Sitting of 17 July 1862

MINUTES.
PUBLIC BILL.—3° Jamaica Loan (Settlement).
WEIGHTS AND MEASURES (IRELAND) ACT (1860) AMENDMENT BILL.

  [BILL NO. 200.] COMMITTEE.
  Bill considered in Committee:—
  (In the Committee.)
  Clause 2 (Short Title).
  SIR ROBERT PEELintimated that in order to embrace the new clauses he had introduced, it would be necessary to alter the title of the Bill as follows:—
  "A Bill to amend the Weights and Measures Act of 1860, and to abolish local Customs and Distinctions in reference to Weights and Measures, and to regulate the Standard of Weights and Measures generally."
  Clause agreed to; as were also clauses 3 and 4.
  Clause 5 (Certain Head and other Constables to be ex-officio Inspectors of Weights and Measures).
  SIR HERVEY BRUCEcomplained that the appointment of Inspectors under this Act should be left to the Inspector General of Constabulary, subject to the approval of the Lord Lieutenant, and that the magistrates of the county should have no voice in the matter. He proposed the insertion of words to provide the appointment of Inspectors under the Bill should be approved of by the justices of the peace of the district to which the Inspector was appointed.
  Amendment proposed,
  In page 2, line 14, after the words "Lord Lieutenant," to insert the words "and justices of the peace of the said district."
  SIR ROBERT PEELopposed the Amendment, urging that its adoption would be to continue an inconvenience now generally complained of. There was no desire to treat the magistrates with disrespect, but it was far more convenient to leave the appointment of these Inspectors in the hands of the chief of the Police, with the assent of the Lord Lieutenant. To meet the objection, however, he was not unwilling to insert words giving to the magistrates control in the way of approval, but providing, that if they do not approve within a month after the appointment, then the appointment of the Inspector General should stand.
  MR. MAGUIREapproved of the proposal of the Chief Secretary.
  MR. SCULLYsaid, the proposal of the right hon. Gentleman, though a specious one, would not effect the object which the hon. Baronet opposite had in view. The important question involved in this matter was whether the management of local affairs was more and more to be handed over to the constabulary authorities, and the local magistrates entirely superseded.
  After some discussion,
  SIR GEORGE GREYsaid, that the proposal of the opposition went beyond the existing law, which gave the power of selection to the Inspector General of Police, but requiring the approval of the magistrates. He thought the object would be met by a proviso to this effect, that if within one month of the date of the selection the justices shall signify their disapproval of the person selected, another selection should be made by the same authority and subject to the same conditions.
  Question put, "That those words be there inserted."
  The Committee divided:—Ayes 15; Noes 36: Majority 21.
  SIR GEORGE GREYthen proposed the following proviso:—
  "Provided, that if within one month from the date of such selection, the justices shall signify their disapproval of the selection of any head or other Constable, another selection shall be made by the same authority, subject to the same conditions."
  Amendment agreed to.
  Clause, as amended, agreed to.
  Clauses from 6 to 10 were likewise agreed to.
  Clause 11 (The Act shall extend throughout Ireland).
  MR. HENNESSYsaid, that the Select Committee on Weights and Measures had just agreed to a Report, which was laid on the table on Tuesday, in which they recommended the adoption of a uniform system of weights and measures for the whole of the United Kingdom. He therefore moved that the word "Ireland" be omitted, and the words "United Kingdom" substituted.
  SIR GEORGE GREYsaid, that the short title of the Bill was "The Weights and Measures (Ireland) Amendment Act," and the whole of the clauses applied to Ireland. It was, no doubt, desirable that uniformity of weights and measures should prevail, but this object could not be carried out in a Bill applicable to Ireland alone.
  Amendment negatived.
  Clause agreed to; as was also Clause 12.
  Clause 13 (Mode of Weighing. Deductions prohibited).
  MR. HENNESSYsaid, that the butter trade of Ireland was centred in Cork, and practical objections were felt by the butter merchants of that city to weighing under this clause the large quantity of butter sold in that city. The country farmers were in the habit of soaking the firkins to increase the weight; so that if no deductions were allowed, it would be necessary to strip 2,000 firkins of butter every day, and in hot weather the butter would be floating about the market. The clause would not only interfere with the freedom of trade, but since deductions were allowed in the London, Liverpool, Glasgow, and other English and Scotch markets, the Irish merchants would not be able to compete on equal terms with the merchants of other parts of the kingdom. He did not object to the uniform abolition of deductions. The clause, moreover, was opposed to the principle of the recommendation of the Weights and Measures Committee, which was that one uniform system should be adopted throughout the whole kingdom.
  House resumed.
  Committee report Progress; to sit again To-morrow at Twelve of the clock.

INDIAN CIVIL SERVICE.—QUESTION.
MR. VANSITTARTsaid, he would beg to ask the Secretary of State for India, Whether his attention or that of his Council has been directed to the Memorials of Her Majesty's Covenanted Civilians, praying for the redress of certain grievances?
SIR CHARLES WOODsaid, that the Memorial in question had received the attention of himself and of the Members of his Council; but the question required very considerable attention, especially as the circumstances of the memorialists in the three Presidencies were different, and their requests different, and where there were also certain arrangements of a complicated character that must be gone into. He quite agreed that the case was one which required action on the part of the Government, and he could assure his hon. Friend that it should receive the most careful consideration from himself and the Council of India.

THE NORTH WEST PROVINCES OF INDIA.—QUESTION.
MR. ARTHUR MILLSsaid, he wished
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to ask the Secretary of State for India, Whether any official information has been received by the Government with respect to the rumoured symptoms of disaffection in the North West Provinces?
SIR CHARLES WOODin reply said, he had received no official information whatever upon the subject. He had heard from private letters that there appeared to be a disposition for some movement on the part of the Mohammedan population; but the Government were aware of what was going on, and they did not consider that there was the slightest cause for apprehension.

THE NAVAL ESTABLISHMENT IN CHINA.—QUESTION.
COLONEL SYKESsaid, he rose to ask the Secretary to the Admiralty, Whether the 1,000 supernumerary Officers, Engineers, Seamen, and others, said to be now on board Her Majesty's Ship Sanspareil, under orders for China, are surplus to the regular Naval Establishment in China, or are intended to fill up vacancies; and, in case they are surplus, how they are to be employed?
LORD CLARENCE PAGETreplied that the Sanspareil had been sent out with reliefs to the gunboats upon the Indian station, the time of service of a considerable number of the Officers and men having expired.

VOTE OF CREDIT FOR CHINA.

  QUESTION.
  GENERAL PEELsaid, he wished to ask Mr. Chancellor of the Exchequer, If it is his intention to ask for any vote of credit on account of China during the present Session? He wished also to ask, Whether, if that be the case, any portion of the amount will be applicable to the service of the present year; and if it be not so, out of what fund the expenses not provided for in the Estimates are to be met?
  THE CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUERreplied, that the right hon. Gentleman had put a question of which he had not given notice, as well as that of which he had given notice, and he could only answer with respect to the subject to which the question on the Paper referred. There was no intention to ask the House for any Vote of Credit on account of China. There was an unexhausted authority remaining upon former Votes of Credit of about £700,000, and the ex-

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  penses of the year on account of the Vote of Credit would be, as he had estimated them in March last, about £500,000. He was not aware that that Vote would be applicable to any operations that had taken place since the pacification of China. Certainly the purpose for which it was asked was to complete the payment on account of the war with China; and, speaking without the power of any minute investigation, his impression was that the application must be exclusively confined to the settlement of that account. If the right hon. Gentleman, however, required further information upon that point, he would give it with perfect precision on a future day.

SLAVERY AT LAGOS.—QUESTION.
SIR FRANCIS BARINGsaid, he rose to ask the Under Secretary of State for the Colonies, Whether any Ordinance has been issued by the Governor of Lagos for the registry of slaves there; and whether Government has issued any directions with respect to persons who were in a state of slavery at Lagos at the time when it became a British Possession; and, if so, whether there is any objection to laying these directions upon the table?
MR. CHICHESTER FORTESCUEsaid, in reply, that the affairs of Lagos were so new to the Colonial Office that he was afraid he should not be able to give so much information as the right hon. Gentleman might wish to have. But with respect to the first part of the question, he had no knowledge whatever of any such Ordinance having been issued at Lagos. With respect to the second part, no directions had been sent out on the part of the Secretary of State upon the subject of slavery; but his noble Friend at the head of the Colonial Department was fully alive to the great importance of the question, and had called for full information from the Governor by the next mail.

THE POLICE—FELONIOUS ASSAULT ON A MEMBER.—OBSERVATIONS.
LORD HENRY LENNOXsaid, he wished to ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether any information had reached him respecting the recent assault on the person of a Member of that House (Mr. Pilkington); and in doing so hoped the House would indulge him for a few minutes while he stated the circumstances of the assault which had lately been made on the hon. Member for
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Blackburn. The hon. Member left the House at one o'clock on Tuesday morning, having been attending his Parliamentary duties up to that hour; he had reached Waterloo Place, and was passing the Guards' Monument, when an assault which reduced him to a state of insensibility was suddenly made upon him, but whence it came or by whom it was made he did not know. The hon. Gentleman remained for some time insensible on the pavement, but was at length conveyed to his hotel, where, on examination, he was found to have suffered severe personal injury, his jaw bone being much cut; there were several contusions on his head, and a suspicious pain round his throat, which indicated to the medical men the nature of the garotting instrument that had been applied to this gentleman in one of the most crowded thoroughfares. He trusted, therefore, that he should not be considered overstepping his duty if he asked the Home Secretary to give the House an asusrance that he would put himself in communication with the Chief Commissioner of Police, with a view of providing that all possible care should be taken to prevent the recurrence of such an outrage.
SIR GEORGE GREYsaid, that directly he heard of the assault he called upon the police authorities for a report of the circumstances, and he found that they very much resembled the account which the noble Lord had given to the House. It appeared that no one had witnessed the assault except those who committed it. The thoroughfare where it occurred was at times crowded, but at the hour when the outrage was committed few persons were usually there. Five police constables were on their respective beats in the neighbourhood, and were totally unaware of the occurrence, until a person went up to one of them and told him that a man was lying in a state of insensibility on the pavement, not far from the monument. The police immediately went to the spot, but found no one there; the fact being that the hon. Member, though seriously injured and partly stunned by the blow, was able to find his way to his hotel; but he had but an imperfect recollection of the circumstances which had occurred. The hon. Gentleman was robbed of his watch, but not of the money which was in his pocket. It appeared that on the same night, in another part of London—in Piccadilly, between St. James's Street and the corner of Bond Street—a similar assault,

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almost identical in character, was committed on the son of a gentleman connected with the British Museum (Mr. Hawkins), who was robbed of his watch and not of the money he had about him. In this case a police constable was almost on the spot, but did not see the assault, though he was able to render immediate assistance. The injured person was unable to state what had occurred, his mind being in a state of confusion from the suddenness and nature of the assault. It was impossible, of course, for a policeman to be in every spot where a gentleman happened to be assaulted, but in the latter case a policeman was immediately in attendance and afforded relief. An accurate description of the two watches had been given, and he hoped this would lead to the discovery of the robber or robbers. It was not improbable that it was the same person or party who committed both assaults. It was remarkable that in neither case was any attempt made to take away the money of the person assaulted, and this seemed to show that the object was, when nobody happened to be close at hand, to inflict a blow which should stun the victim and then to seize the watch of the person assaulted without staying to rifle the pockets. Directions, however, had been given by the police authorities, and precautions taken, which it was not necessary for him to state, but which he hoped would afford additional security against the perpetration of similar outrages.

EAST INDIA REVENUE ACCOUNTS.

  FINANCIAL STATEMENT.
  East India Revenue Accounts—considered in Committee:—
  (In the Committee.)
  SIR CHARLES WOODrose and said: Before I proceed to the substance of what I have to address to the Committee, it may be as well that I should explain the nature of the proceeding which I propose for their adoption. On recent occasions, when the financial statements with respect to India have been made, either by the noble Lord opposite or by myself, it has been when powers have been asked from this House to raise money for the service of India. On the last occasion—in July last—fearing that the railroad companies might not be able to raise as much money as would be required for the expenditure on account of railroads for the year, I took the precaution of asking
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  power from the House to raise money for the purpose. I am happy to say that the railroad companies have succeeded in raising more than the sum required, and I have not availed myself of the power intrusted to me by the House. This year the finances of India are in such a state, though not quite so flourishing as at one time was represented, that it is not necessary for me to ask the House to intrust me with any power for raising money. In order, therefore, to lay ground for the statement I am about to make, I have reverted to what was the practice of the House before the last year or two, and, referring the Indian accounts to a Committee of the Whole House, I shall move in the Committee certain formal Resolutions. It may be desirable also that I should caution hon. Gentlemen, that some confusion may arise from our having to deal with the finances of three separate consecutive years. The Chancellor of the Exchequer of this country deals with the last year and the coming year; but, owing to accelerated communication with India, we have now the financial state of India for three years before us at the same time. This year I shall have to refer to the accounts of 1860–1, to what is called the regular estimate of the year 1861–2, made up towards the close of that year, and to the budget estimate made before the beginning of the year as regards 1862–3. The Resolutions, however, which I shall move will have reference simply to the year 1860–1, though it will be my duty to state what probably will be of more pressing interest—the prospect of the Indian finances for 1861–2 and 1862–3. Before doing that, I must place the House in possession of what I believe to be an accurate statement of the accounts for for 1860–1, and of the estimates for those two latter years; and I cannot, therefore, avoid referring to the differences between the Home Government and the Government of India on this subject, which appear in the correspondence on the table of the House. It is painful to me to do so, as I see that they have been represented by some persons as personal differences between Mr. Laing and myself. I can only say, on that point, that no personal feeling of difference exists on my part towards Mr. Laing. I can appeal to many common friends to say whether I have not acted in a most friendly way with Mr. Laing. We have been in constant communication, and during the last year, when

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  he was in this country, the most unrestricted communication took place between him, the members of the Indian Council, and myself; and I was not aware that there was any difference between us on any Indian questions, or, until this matter arose, as to the principle on which the Indian accounts and estimates should be taken. I postponed the present discussion to this evening in order that Mr. Laing might be able to send to me a memorandum in explanation of the points commented upon in the despatch of the 9th of June, expressing my readiness to lay on the table any explanatory statement on his part. I thought that was due to him, though he was only an individual member of the Government of India. Obviously, however, any answer to a despatch addressed to the Government of India ought to proceed from them; and it must be observed, that for the opinions expressed in that memorandum he alone is responsible, and not the Government of India. He refers to the general financial policy of the Indian Government, and to Lord Canning's general policy. I have approved of the former, and to the latter I have given the most unqualified support. There is, however, one point on which I must be permitted to say a word; because, if anything personal is introduced into this discussion, it arises, I think, in the tone of Mr. Laing's memorandum rather than in anything that has proceeded from the India Office. There are statements made in that memorandum which, if true, would place me in the strange position of having said one thing to one man and a different thing to another. Mr. Laing states, that if he had acted on the suggestion or in accordance with the opinion of the Home Government, the 10 per cent duties on manufactured goods would now be in existence. That is a statement which he is not justified in making, and for this reason, that so long ago as April, 1861, I wrote a despatch, stating that in my opinion the duties were too high, "and that it would be consistent with sound policy to reduce them as soon as our financial condition admitted of the reduction." That view was enunciated in a public despatch of a year ago; but I also early in the present year wrote to Lord Elgin and also to Mr. Laing, stating it to be my opinion and wish that the 10 per cent duties should be reduced. I gave them no instructions to reduce them, because I was not aware of the financial position of India at the moment, while I thought it but fair
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  that they should have the credit of making any proposal for reduction which they might think proper. Mr. Laing, therefore, is quite incorrect in saying, that if he had acted in accordance with the views of the Home Government, the 10 per cent duties would still be in existence. I have approved of the reductions, even though they may lead to a deficit, but all these matters have really nothing to do with that which I have deemed it to be my duty to endeavour to correct—namely, the inaccuracy of the estimates and accounts which have been sent home from India, not in small matters only, but in matters of very considerable importance; the most important of them involving a principle which I think has been erroneously adopted by the Government of India, and involving an error approaching to nearly a million in each of three consecutive years. Now, this question of Indian accounts is not one which has arisen this year for the first time. It has been to me, ever since I have been at the head of the Indian Department, a source of the greatest annoyance that I have not been able to depend on the accuracy of the accounts sent home from India. There are two or three members of my Council who are well versed in subjects of this description, and I myself have been unremitting in my endeavour, in conjunction with them, to bring those accounts into a correct shape. The errors in the statements of account now lying before the House exceed, however, any with which it has hitherto been my lot to deal. These accounts are wrong in principle, whereas those previously sent home involved error merely in the mode in which they were stated. I am responsible for the accounts which I lay on the table of this House, and I must therefore see that the accounts produced to Parliament are in such a shape as I can answer for. The hon. Member for Evesham, whom I see opposite, as well as many other hon. Members, takes great interest both in India and in the accuracy of all public accounts, and I have no doubt both he and they would find great fault with me if I were to submit to Parliament statements of a nature which I could not defend. Confidence in the security of Indian Stock, which is held by so many persons in this country, and confidence in the general welfare of India, which is so important to everybody in this country, depends, to a great extent, on the accuracy of the information given with respect to Indian fi-

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  nance. The public generally, both in India and in this country, would have a just cause of complaint if other than correct information were furnished by the Department over which I have the honour to preside. If, for example, as is undoubtedly the case in the statements for the last year or two, items are omitted from the charge which were invariably included before, and items set down as revenue which were never previously so placed; and if these two proceedings are contemporaneous, it is obvious that a statement so framed is productive of a result utterly dissimilar from that shown in former years, without any real change of circumstances, and gives a flourishing view of finance as compared with previous accounts which is not founded on the real facts of the case. That such is the state of things, so far as relates to the Indian accounts with which I have to deal, I can, I think, without any great difficulty, demonstrate; but in order that I may be able to do so, it will, of course, be necessary that those Gentlemen who do me the honour to listen to me, and who take an interest in this subject, should pay close attention to each statement as it is made, because, although the explanation which I have to give is simple enough in principle, yet it may not be quite be easy to render its details perfectly clear. The accounts, then, on the table of the House, and on which my Resolutions depend, are those for 1860–1. The accounts for that year seem to have a sort of fatality attending them. Last year there was a statement made which took us all by surprise, to the effect that the expenditure for 1860–1 had been larger than that for 1859–60. We were assured by the Indian Government in June, 1860, that there was a large reduction, not in prospect, but actually realized, on a comparison of those two years; yet, much to our astonishment, we afterwards learnt, from the statement of Mr. Laing, in the Council of the Governor General, that the expenditure for 1860–1 was higher than that for the previous year. Nor was that surprise diminished when, on referring to the actual accounts, we found, instead of an increase in expenditure to the extent of £213,000, an actual diminution to the extent of £4,400,000. Now, as I told the House last year, Mr. Laing informed me that he had been misled by the estimates published by the Financial Department in India, with reference to the expenditure for 1859–60. I not unnaturally com-
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  mented upon this in a despatch addressed to the Government of India; but I have since heard from Mr. Lushington, the Financial Secretary to the Government of India, that he did not mislead Mr. Laing in any way, and that Mr. Laing must have been perfectly cognizant of the accounts for 1859–60 having been made up at the time he made use of the estimates in his statement. I refer to this point simply in justice to Mr. Lushington, on whom I may have indirectly cast some imputation in the course of the observations which I made last year. Mr. Laing's further explanation, on which I will make no further comment, is in the papers on the table. We have now received the accounts for 1860–1, and I did not anticipate that I should have any more trouble with them. Strange to say, however, we found, when they arrived, that they contained two most singular mistakes, one involving an error to the extent of about £1,000,000, by adding a sum of that amount twice over. But on the other side of the account there was a more serious error, of about the same amount—we found the home charge reduced by about £1,000,000. We were surprised to find this to be the case, as the home charges for 1860–1 had more than once been stated with sufficient accuracy, both here and by Mr. Wilson and Mr. Laing himself in India, at about £5,300,000. We were, therefore, much astonished at finding the sum reduced to £4,300,000, without a word of explanation, except a reference to what was done in another year. It was by following the track thus suggested to us, and not from explanation afforded to us by the Government of India, that we discovered how the reduction had been made. The way in which the reduction was made, was by treating all the items included in the £1,000,000 of entries on the receipt side of the home account as items of revenue, and deducting them from the charges which appeared on the other side. I admit that a small proportion of them ought properly to be so treated; as, for instance, interest on the investment of cash balances. In the years 1862–3 I have allowed not only that deduction, but several other items of a more questionable character. But the main point at issue as to the accounts of 1860–1, which I wish to raise and to discuss separately, when I have dealt with the accounts of 1862–3, in which the same error has been made, is the question whether repayments, which constitute nine-tenths, or

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  even more, of the whole sum deducted, can be considered to be part of the revenue of the year. In the mean time I come to the estimate of 1861–2. That estimate was sent home last year; and omitting, as we were told in the despatch of the Government of India, the loss by exchange, £473,000, and arbitratrarily reducing the home charge by £317,000, making together £790,000, the charge for the year was stated at £41,554,000. From that amount the Government of India deducted £500,000, which they intended to transfer to the local budgets, and the result was a total charge of £41,054,000. Deducting that charge from the income, £41,294,000, there was an estimated surplus of £240,000. On considering that estimate at home, we did not consider that they were justified either in deducting the loss by exchange or in making a reduction upon the Home charge; and we pointed out to them, that if those two sums, together £790,000, were added, the result would show, instead of a surplus, a deficit of £550,000. Inasmuch as the loss by exchange occurs again in 1862–3, I shall defer the argument upon that question until I have gone through the estimate of 1862–3. I only wish the Committee to observe that the same reasoning applies to both years. With respect to the reduction of the home charges, there is no pretence for saying that it was in consequence of any receipt of any sort or kind. Mr. Laing states his reason for making it. It so happened that the estimate of the military charge at home in 1861–2 was, in round numbers, £1,400,000, nearly the same as in the preceding year. The estimate was made up in the Accountant's Department of the India Office. The official gentlemen in that department knew what the charge was, having every means of ascertaining it, which the Government in India had not. Mr. Laing says he naturally concluded that the sum of £1,400,000 must have been assumed at the same amount as that in the previous year. He could not give us credit for knowing what the charge was likely to be, but chose to assume that we had neglected our duty, and taken the charge merely from the amount in the preceding year. Therefore he went to the President of the Military Finance Committee and asked him what reduction ought to have been made, and then he took off one half. This is his own statement. I say he was not justified in making, on such grounds, a
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  reduction upon the estimate sent to India from this country—an estimate, be it remembered, made up by the Department which alone possessed the means of knowing what the charge was likely to be. In what is called the regular estimate—made up long after they had received our despatch on the subject, explaining the reason for what we had done—the same omission is made, with a full knowledge of what we had explained—namely, that the reason why the military charge in 1861–2 was nearly the same as in 1860–1, was that there was an arrear of the War Office charge, not belonging to the year, but having to be paid within it. The addition of that sum to the reduced charge for the year accidentally made the actual amount to be paid about the same as that of the preceding year. Nevertheless, after that intimation, with a full knowledge of the reason why the sum happened to be the same, the sum of £317,000 was still deducted in the regular estimate. It is curious enough that in the budget estimate, in which Mr. Laing had professed to omit the loss by exchange, it had, nevertheless, by mistake been included; but when we come to the regular estimate, in which the Government of India had been instructed by the Secretary of State to insert it, we find that they have omitted it. They were obliged, being disappointed in the transfer of £500,000 to the local budgets, to add that sum to the budget estimate; but they omitted, contrary to the directions of the Secretary of State, who is supreme in that matter, the loss by exchange, and they persisted, also contrary to the instructions of the Secretary of State, accompanied by reasons, in the reduction of the home charge to which I have already alluded. The result was that the charge for 1861–2, as stated in the regular estimate sent from India, is less than it ought to have been by two sums of £473,000 and £317,000, or a total of £790,000.
  COLONEL SYKES: Is the right hon. Baronet alluding to the corrected estimate of April last?
  SIR CHARLES WOOD: Yes; the estimate sent in the despatch of which the date is the 19th of April. Acting upon these grounds, the Government of India abandoned the licence tax. I wish now for a moment to refer to a debate which took place in this House in February, 1861, when I was supposed to have taken rather too sanguine a view of the finances to

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  India. At that time, no doubt, there was a very desponding view of Indian finance taken in this country, and, more than that, there was likewise a desponding view taken in India. I stated then, that if the reductions were made which I anticipated, and if the estimated produce of the licence tax were realized—namely, about £600,000—I did not despair of the finances of India being brought round in the course of the year. According to the estimates now received, there will, after the abandonment of the licence tax, be a deficit of £595,000. I hope, therefore, that those hon. Gentlemen who doubted my statements will now acknowledge that I did not speak without warrant, because, if the licence tax had not been given up, the finances of India would have been as near as may be in a state of equilibrium at the end of 1861–2. I now come to the estimate for 1862–3. Mr. Laing states, that without any alteration either in income or in charge, the former would be £43,796,000, and the latter £42,364,000, giving a surplus of £1,432,000. In this year also the loss by exchange is omitted, and the home charge is erroneously reduced to the extent of £529,000. Altogether the apparent charge for the year is reduced by £987,000, in consequence of departing from the practice of former years, and from what we believe to be sound principles of account. Deduct from the supposed surplus the amount of these two items, and it will leave a surplus of £440,000. Taxes have been repealed to the extent of £725,000, and therefore a deficit is created, according to my view of finance, to the extent of £285,000. Whether these deductions are justifiable I am now about to discuss. I have gone through the accounts and estimates of the three years. I have shown that in the first year the errors on the two sides balance each other, and therefore the real deficit is about the sum which appears, namely, £4,000,000. In 1861–2 there will, according to the last estimates, be a deficit of £595,000; and in 1862–3 there will be a deficit of £285,000. The question turns, in both cases, substantially on two points, and two points only—namely, whether it is right to omit the loss by exchange from the charges; and, secondly, whether repayments of advances are properly to be treated as income. If they are, and if the loss by exchange be properly omitted, the deficit is not what I
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  suppose it to be. I wish, before I approach these two points, to make clear one other point, which seems to me to be an error, and which occurs more than once in Mr. Laing's memorandum—namely, the assumption that the fact of the cash balances in India having increased is a clear demonstration that there is a surplus revenue. In the first place, I must observe, that as our expenditure in this country on Indian account can only be provided out of Indian revenue, so long as we do not draw money from India there must be an increase of the cash balances in India; but that is no proof of a surplus revenue when you include the whole charge in India and here. More than that, cash balances may be increased from a variety of sources besides revenue. Cash balances may be increased by prize money, by subscriptions to the service funds; loans are paid into cash balances; and the increase of cash balances, under these circumstances, proves nothing as to the surplus of revenue. In point of fact, the truth is, that we have been led to borrow more than we wanted. In the early part of the year 1861 the Government of India represented officially, and Mr. Laing himself backed the statement very strongly, that they were in a state of great distress; that their balances would be "reduced to the minimum point at which it is possible to conduct the Government of India;" that they anticipated that the state of the North Western Provinces would most seriously affect the revenue; that unless they had some assistance they should be obliged to stop the public works. The state of things they represented was so bad that I sold securities here, bought a million of silver, and sent it to India. Then some of the railroad companies, upon whose payments into the Home Treasury we depended for our home expenditure, seemed little likely to be able to raise as much as would provide for that expenditure. Influenced by these various considerations, I borrowed money in this country in June, 1861, stating at the time that it was to make myself sure as to the means of meeting the home expenditure. But it turned out that the representations made to us from India, in February, were erroneous. The cash balances at the end of April were high; the Treasury in India was not pressed upon to remit for our home expenses, as we had borrowed money to defray them; and in these circumstances it was inevitable that the cash balances in

  437
  India should be increased. The fact is, that the cash balances have not increased now up to the amount of the excess of the money borrowed beyond the deficits which have had to be met by loans since the year 1858. Therefore the assertion that the increase of the cash balances is a clear demonstration of a surplus revenue is a total mistake. It is no proof under any circumstances; but when I show that the excess of loans actually exceeds the increase of cash balances, the presumption that there was a surplus revenue is entirely rebutted. I come now to the first question, that of the loss by exchange. It is rather a complicated matter, and I must beg the attention of hon. Members to what I am about to state. When the contracts with the railroads were made, the rate of exchange for the rupee was about 1s. 10 d.; and in the contracts with the railroads it was provided, that the rupee should in all accounts between the railroad companies and Government be taken at that rate. As hon. Gentlemen are aware, the railroad money is paid into the home treasury, and is available for home expenditure. The revenues of India are paid into the Indian treasury, and to the extent necessary are applied to the expenditure on the railways in India. The consequence of this arrangement is, that for every 1s. 10 d. we receive into the home treasury we are bound to expend a rupee in India. So long as the exchange remained at 1s. 10 d. for the rupee, there was no loss or gain on either side; but when the value of the rupee rose to 2s., then we became bound, for every 1s. 10 d. we receive here, to spend the equivalent of a rupee, or 2s., in India; and the difference between the two amounts constitutes what is technically known by the phrase "loss on exchange." When the tables are turned, when the receipts of the railways in India are remitted to this country, in payment of dividends, we shall account to the companies for 1s. 10 d. only for every rupee received in India—that is, assuming a capital of a million, when we receive 545,000 rupees, in round numbers, we shall have to pay 500,000 rupees, or £50,000, for guaranteed interest, and retain the remainder (45,000 rupees) as representing 2d. in each rupee. Therefore, it is quite possible that we may recover what we are now paying; it is also perfectly possible that we may never recover a farthing. If the rate of exchange comes down to 1s. 10 d., we never can recover one penny of the loss. If the re-
  438
  ceipts are not sufficient to pay the interest, we never can recover a penny of it. The recovery of this money depends on the double contingency of the maintenance of the rate of exchange at 2s., and the sufficiency of the receipts of the railroads to pay the guaranteed interest. The guaranteed interest is, to a certain extent, in the same condition. We pay it now out of the revenues of India. We may recover great part of it when the railroads make a sufficient return; but in the mean time the interest has been charged on the Indian revenue of the year. When we come to receive our half of the surplus profits—and I hope the day is not far distant when we shall do so—then there will be an extraordinary receipt, as there is now an extraordinary charge, on this account. In like manner the loss by exchange has always been dealt with as an extraordinary charge, and by-and-by we may from a similar source have an extraordinary receipt. Every Government in India, up to last year 1861–2, and the Government at home, has always treated this loss by exchange as a charge on the revenue of India. I wish now to call the attention of the House to the reasons recently given by the Government of India for treating it otherwise. The first reason is given at page 13 of the papers on the table of the House. The Government say—
  "We have omitted this charge, as the interest on advances to railway companies for this year must be an equivalent for any loss by exchange on remittances under existing contracts, and we take it for granted that you will not renew or modify any contracts without expunging this objectionable clause."
  Now, it will be observed that in that statement the loss by exchange is admitted as a charge on the revenue, but a set-off is pleaded—namely, that we should receive from the railway companies interest on the advances made to them equivalent to the charge of the loss by exchange. If there had been such a receipt, it might have been treated as a set-off; but, unfortunately, the Government of India should have known that no such money could be received, as the only source for the payment of railway interest is the revenue of India. The proposal of the Indian Government is simply this,—that they will set off one payment against another; and the loss by the exchange, which we pay, is to be compensated for to us by the interest which we also pay upon the money bor-

  439
  rowed in order to make advances to some of the railroad companies. When the railway companies were not able to raise money for themselves, we advanced it to them to prevent their works from standing still. That money we borrowed, and pay 5 per cent interest for it, and this 5 per cent interest that we pay on the money so borrowed is, forsooth, to be set against our loss by the exchange! In his memorandum Mr. Laing has given two reasons for this proceeding, which are to be found at page 3 of that paper. He says he will subject it to two tests. The first is—
  "Suppose the rate of exchange on account had been fixed at 2s. 2d. instead of 1s. 10 d. for the rupee, should we have treated the excess as a receipt?"
  Certainly, we should. And the statement I have already made shows that we propose to proceed on this principle, because if the rate of exchange remains at 2s., we shall account for 1s. 10 d. only on each rupee that is remitted for the payment of interest, and the difference between the 2s. and the 1s. 10 d. will be treated as an extraordinary receipt. The second test is this—
  "How can that be a charge on the revenue of the year which has certainly not been paid in the course of the year; and which, as certainly, is owing to no one at its conclusion?"
  And Mr. Laing adds—
  "I appeal to this latter test with the more confidence, because in no estimate or account from England has this sum ever been entered as a charge to be paid there, or included in any demand for remittances; and it is quite certain that no one claims it in India."
  No doubt it has never been included in any account transmitted from England, for the simple reason that it is paid in India. Then comes Mr. Laing's statement that "it is not paid in India." Why, it has been paid every year in India, and appears in all the Indian accounts from the beginning. The Government in India has always included it in the Indian accounts. And what is really rather staggering is, that here we have the accounts of 1860–1, transmitted by the Government of India when Mr. Laing was at Calcutta, in which there appears among the charges in India "loss by exchange on railway transactions, £469,759." How, with a document before him in which this is stated as a charge on the Indian revenue, Mr. Laing should now say that it is not paid in India, certainly passes my comprehension. Not only that, but
  440
  the Government of India, or at any rate one member of it—I mean Sir Bartle Frere—speaking as the organ of the Government of India, in the Governor General's Council in July, 1861, when Mr. Laing was in England, and when they had received our despatch stating that this charge ought to be included—Sir Bartle Frere, in moving the Income Tax Bill, used these words—
  "After mature consideration, however, the Secretary of State did not think it desirable to propose any alteration in the terms of the existing contracts with the old guaranteed railway companies, and it would therefore have been necessary to have added a sum of £495,000 to the estimate of expenditure of the current year. But this will not affect the total of the estimate, for each Government had charged itself with the loss by exchange on railway capital, and the whole sum was included in the £3,096,916 there set down for 'civil and political charges, including contingencies.'"
  For some years it was not stated separately; it was included in the miscellaneous charges. I myself directed that it should be shown separately; and in two, if not three, consecutive years since then, it has been shown separately as a charge on the Indian revenue paid in India—even the very last account for 1860–1, as I have said, so showing it. Then, I take the two tests which Mr. Laing himself takes, and the second—the one to which he appeals with the greatest confidence. He says it never has been paid in India. That it has been so paid I have proved from the very last accounts. Every Government has so treated it. Thinking it right that the same course should be continued, we determined that it should be included, and gave directions in the clearest terms accordingly. In spite of the positive directions of the Secretary of State to the Government of India, they have chosen to exclude that which every Government had included, and which we, the supreme authority in this matter, directed to be included, in order to give a just view of the finances of India. Hon. Gentlemen will at once see, that if that which has invariably been included in the expenditure is to be excluded in a subsequent year, you have a very fallacious account of the expenditure in India. I think, Sir, I need say no more on the subject of the loss by exchange. The next question is the repayment of advances; and on that I will again refer to Mr. Laing's own memorandum, and quote his own words, that there may be no misapprehension about the matter. He says—

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  "The Secretary of State says, 'it is contrary to the first principles of account to treat sums so repaid as part of the income of the year.' I must confess my surprise at such a statement from one who has filled the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer in England."
  Well, I certainly have filled that office, and I repeat again, with the most perfect confidence, and with the conviction that no person in this House who has ever been Chancellor of the Exchequer will contradict my opinion, that the repayment of an advance cannot be regarded as an item of revenue. There are certain advances made from the treasury in India on account of the Imperial Government. I will enter into detail about them presently. They are repaid to the treasury of the Indian Government at home. What they are really is a transfer from the treasury in Calcutta to the treasury in London. They are not treated as items of expenditure when advanced, and of course they cannot be treated as items of revenue when repaid. Mr. Laing quotes against me great authorities—he quotes my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer on my right, another right hon. Friend of mine whom I do not see in the House, and also Mr. Wilson. But the cases are not in the slightest degree similar or parallel. Certain muskets were supplied to the Spanish Government, and the expense of the muskets charged upon the revenue of this country when they were made. The repayment was treated properly as an extraordinary receipt. So, in the Crimean war, stores were provided and charged upon the revenue; and when they were afterwards sold, the produce of them was properly carried to the miscellaneous receipts, according to the ordinary course and practice. The cases of what was done by Mr. Gladstone and Sir George Lewis do not, therefore, bear in the least on the question; but Mr. Laing asks—
  "Or, again, was Mr. Wilson, after five years' experience as Secretary to the Treasury, ignorant of the A B C of accounts when he made a precisely similar deduction in 1860?"
  My answer to that is, that I do not believe Mr. Wilson ever made "a precisely similar deduction." I cannot exactly make out to what Mr. Laing here alludes. I suppose it must be to the same thing as he mentioned at the beginning of his memorandum, where he states that Mr. Wilson with his own hand made an arbitrary reduction in the home charges. All I can say is, that there is not the slightest trace of anything of the
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  kind in the accounts. If done at all, it must have been done in 1859–60, or the next year. Well, we have got the amount of the home charge which Mr. Wilson stated for 1859–60; we have got the amount of the home charge which we sent out to Mr. Wilson. Our charge was stated to include stores, and Mr. Wilson from it very properly deducted the charge for stores, as it was intended it should be done. We could not tell here exactly what the amount was; but the stores are always charged to the Indian account, although paid for here. We sent out, in November, 1859, a certain estimate of £5,700,000, including stores. Mr. Wilson sent home in the appendix to his speech made in February what the amount of the stores was. He deducted that from the total which we sent out, and the remainder is the sum which was properly stated by him as the whole charge, exclusive of stores. But that was not an arbitrary deduction from the home estimate, nor is it treating a repayment as revenue. In the next year he stated as home charge the precise sum which we had sent out. I will now state what these repayments and advances are. Payments were made for troops going to China, or on account of the troops there; advances are made on account of the emigration of Coolies, upon account of pensions paid in India to out-pensioners of Chelsea Hospital, and on account of charges for the late China expedition; and bills of exchange have been cashed in India on account of the Imperial Government. Those are all advances made to the Imperial Government. It was settled that all the charges for the late China expedition should be borne by the Imperial Government, and therefore all expenses incurred in India for that expedition were treated as advances to the Imperial Government, and never appeared in any account of Indian expenditure. We authorized the paymasters of the forces in China to draw upon the Calcutta Treasury to a certain stipulated amount, which was to be repaid here. That was done, but they were simply advances made out of the Indian Treasury in Calcutta, and repaid by the Imperial Treasury in London. I have in my hand half a dozen navy bills drawn, some by the storekeeper at Trincomalee, and some by the paymasters of ships, for cash upon the Treasury in Calcutta, and then made payable to the Secretary of State for India. They are cashed in India, and sent to us. We send them

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  to the Accountant General of the Navy, and they are paid into our Home Treasury. It seems to be the simplest matter possible, and I cannot understand how anybody, even the most ignorant of financial matters, could call those repayments items of revenue. In illustration of my views I will mention a case which may be familiar to all. Most of us have a London banker and a country banker. Last year I had a visit from a friend at my house in Yorkshire. When he was coming to London, he told me he was short of money, and asked me to give him my check upon my Doncaster bankers for £20, which he would repay in London. That was about Christmas. He received the £20 in Doncaster, and early in the following year he repaid the sum to my bankers in London. Would any one say that I ought to treat that £20 received for me by my London bankers as part of my income for the year? I really am ashamed, as an ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer, to have to discuss such a point. It is still more strange that there should have been such a proposition put forward, because I hold in my hand a Report of the Finance Committee which sat in Calcutta, whilst Mr. Laing was there, and which was sent to us in a despatch signed by him. It is a Report in reference to the statement of expenditure sent from this country to India, and it says—
  "The financial transactions with the home authorities connected with railways in India, payments on account of the civil service in India, and remittance transactions with Her Majesty's Government, not being charges against India, but merely remittances or advances, are omitted from the statement. They are all duly adjusted in the accounts prepared in this country, the sums received and paid in England being met by equivalent debits or credits in the general accounts."
  That is a perfectly accurate statement of the mode of dealing with such transactions, and I confess that it does pass my comprehension how, with such full knowledge of what was the right mode of dealing with them, it can be alleged for a moment, as it is urged with great perseverance in the memorandum, that repayment of advances can or ought to be treated as revenue. Then the argument goes on in the oddest way to say—
  "I cannot understand what is meant by stating that these China advances formed no part of the annual charges for the year in which they were made. They were actually paid, I imagine, in hard rupees out of the cash balances of the Indian Treasury."
  No doubt, they were paid in hard rupees; but all the disbursements, whether for an-
  444
  nual expenditure or for advances, were made in hard rupees. I will venture to say that the navy paymaster's bills were paid in hard rupees, but no one can say that this constitutes them an item of charge against the revenue of India. The memorandum then goes on in a way that is not a little remarkable. Mr. Laing refers to a document which appears in these despatches or Statement (A) as conclusive proof of his view—
  "The Statement (A) of home charges in 1862–3 is essentially a revenue statement sent for the purpose of enabling me to make a budget for the year, and not a cash balance statement, showing other receipts and payments that are not revenue, which, in fact, was not sent until a subsequent mail, and did not reach India until after the budget had been necessarily produced in anticipation of the new financial year."
  I must attribute that statement to forgetfulness, although it is remarkable that Mr. Laing should have forgotten that the Statement (A) was never sent from this country, but was made up in India. There was only one statement sent from this country, and that appears in the printed papers in the hands of Members. It is quite true that Statement (A) is purely a revenue statement; but it was made in India, and contains the mistakes which I have commented upon. The statement sent from England, which appears at page 48 of the papers, is not a mere revenue statement, but is exactly that which Mr. Laing describes it not to be—a statement comprehending revenue and other receipts and disbursements. It speaks for itself, and the despatch enclosing it is upon the table, it is the document from which Statement (A) was made up by omitting a good deal of what we sent out. As I did not send out that Statement (A), and as what I did send out is the direct reverse of what it is alleged to have been, the argument derived from that paper is altogether without the slightest foundation. Mr. Laing goes on to say that I did not admit in the statement of revenue in the accounts for 1861–2 the receipts from the students at Addiscombe College. I must say, that in this memorandum and in the correspondence, there does appear a lamentable confusion of ideas as to estimates and accounts. There are no accounts for 1861–2; but if I refer to the last account upon the table for 1860–61, at page 48, I find that those receipts are deducted from the military expenditure—"Military College at Addiscombe, £16,000." Therefore the statement in the memorandum is quite erroneous; for

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  it is the practice to show in the accounts the receipts from the students. The memorandum goes on to say—
  "One of the grayest charges against me is, that I did not, in the budget of 1861–2, provide by taxes for an estimate of £215,000, made at home, to be spent upon the new India Office."
  I should be glad to know who made that charge. I have never made it, and I defy any one to find it in the despatches. I agree in the principle laid down in the memorandum, that extraordinary receipts are revenue, and extraordinary charges are expenditure; but, I repeat, without fear of contradiction, that advances are not items to be charged upon expenditure, and that repayments are not to be treated as revenue. I hope that I have now satisfied the Committee upon both points—the loss by exchange and the item of repayments, upon which the question turns of a surplus or a deficit; and that the Council of India and I—for we are all agreed—are right in maintaining that which every preceding Government has maintained. Having then, as I trust, established the correctness of our view of what the two sides of the account ought to contain, I now proceed to state to the House the condition of the Indian finances for the last three years. I am afraid I have already wearied the House by my long explanation; but it was of paramount importance to establish a true basis on which to frame our Indian accounts, so that everybody may know that we deal with them in India just as we should in this country, and that they are perfectly correct and straightforward. The accounts for 1860–1 show a very satisfactory state of improvement. The estimate showed a deficit of £6,500,000; the real deficit was £4,000,000. The increase of revenue over estimate was £3,400,000, and the increase of expenditure over estimate was about £800,000. The income of the year 1860–1 was £42,903,000; the estimated income for 1861–2, without the licence tax, was £42,911,000, and for 1862–3, after the remissions, £42,971,000. The charge for 1860–1 was £46,924,000; the estimated charge for 1861–2 was £43,506,000, and for 1862–3 £43,255,000. These are the corrected figures, and represent what I believe to be the real state of the charges and income in these years. The result of these corrected figures gives, for 1860–1 a deficit of £4,021,000; for 1861–62, £595,000; for 1862–3, of £284,000. Looking to the progress of the revenue,
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  and to the reductions which have been going on, I entertain a hopeful belief that by the end of the year we may find that deficit even less; but that is the calculation at which we arrive at present from the corrected figures. I think it would be satisfactory to the House if I next compare the present state of Indian finance, as we may say that we have now got to something like a permanent state, with the condition of the finances in the year before the mutiny, and we shall then see the progress we have made. In 1856–7—the year ending April 30, 1857—excluding railways, we may say that our income and expenditure were about equal. I hope that will be the case at the end of this year, at any rate in the next. In 1856–7 the income was £33,375,000, and the charge, excluding the railways, £33,300,000, showing a surplus of £75,000. The income has risen since that period, according to the estimates of 1862–3, after remissions, to £43,000,000 in round numbers—an increase of about £9,600,000. Of this, the income tax has produced £1,500,000, and the other taxes which have been increased have produced about £4,000,000—that is to say, £5,500,000 is due either to increased taxes or new taxes. The remainder is due partly to opium, partly to land tax and other taxes, making altogether £9,600,000. The charge in 1856–7 was £33,300,000, and in 1862–63 it will be in round numbers about £41,300,000, showing an increase of £8,000,000. The interest on the debt has increased £2,436,000; the military charges, £1,674,000; and the judicial and police charges, £1,338,000. But for the expenditure on railroads there would be a surplus of about £1,670,000. When we remember that the railroad expenditure will be reproductive, and will contribute to the development of the resources of India, we shall not, I think, look upon this as an unsatisfactory state of things. The charge for railroads, of course, makes a considerable difference. The annual charge of 1856–7, guaranteed interest and loss on exchange, was £673,000; in 1862–3 it was £2,688,000. From this we must, of course, deduct traffic receipts, which, in 1856–7, were £121,000, and in 1862–3, £730,000. The net charge therefore in respect of railroads, in 1856–7, was £551,000, and in 1862–3, £1,958,000. The interest on the debt in 1856–7 was £2,420,000, and in 1862–3 exactly double, or £4,857,000.

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  I now come to what is a most important item—the military charges—which, of course, increased very heavily during the mutiny. In 1856–7 they were £12,781,000; in 1858–9 they were more than double that amount, or £25,449,000. Since that year they have gradually decreased, naturally enough, from a cessation of war charges. They have now got as low as £14,456,000, and I must frankly say that I do not think we shall get them much lower. Some time ago, when we were calculating our future expenditure, we thought if we could get these charges down to £15,000,000, we should do very well; and I think now, if we manage to get them down to £14,000,000, it will be as much as we can do. Here, however, I must again refer for a moment to a passage in Mr. Laing's memorandum, in which he refers to a fear that the Home Government would send out too many recruits to India. I refer to that, because it is a repetition of a charge which has been made in India in the public press there; and which has been sanctioned by a letter of Mr. Laing's, and by a speech which he made. The charge was that in order to relieve the finances of my right hon. Friend here we had unduly charged the finances of India. That is not the case. The Home Government preceded the Government of India in suggestions for the reduction of expenditure, and there are dispatches on the table which show that such was the case. The Government of India, in 1860, asked for forty-five regiments of infantry for the Bengal presidency. After consulting Lord Clyde and other military authorities, we thought thirty-eight sufficient. They asked for thirteen regiments of cavalry; we reduced the number to eight. Of course we did this with great hesitation, because, after all, the Government of India is responsible for the safety and security of India, and it was only after consulting eminent military authorities that we took that responsibility on ourselves. They have since changed their minds, and proposed to send home more regiments. We have acceded to every request they have made, interposing, however, in two cases some delay. They sent home artillery when the number of European artillery were 2,000 below the number which they had reported to be necessary; and they proposed to send home a regiment from Madras, when we thought they had mistaken the opinion of the Madras Government. We desired
  448
  them to send home batteries of the old artillery only as the new batteries were formed; but we ultimately allowed them to send the old batteries home, if they were confident that no risk was run by leaving the artillery in India for a time below the proper number. As regards the regiment for Madras, they had mistaken the views of the Madras Government; but, nevertheless, they sent a regiment home from Bengal, and we have since agreed to take one more regiment from Madras next year. Then comes the sending out of the troops, and this is a point of great importance, because it has been stated that we sent out too many recruits last year, and that the number of men in India would be 9,000 above what was fixed. That representation was written from India last October. Well, what are the facts? In June the Indian Government had stated that what they wanted for India are 73,000 men. We have since brought the number down to 71,000; but when we sent out the recruits, we did not know that the requirements of the Government of India had come down so low as 73,000. I think I explained once before, that in order to keep up an average number of men in India throughout the year, they must be above the required number when the recruits arrive, because as the recruits arrive only once a year, in the beginning of winter, the men would otherwise in the course of the year fall below the average, owing to deaths, sickness, and invaliding. The casualties, including time-expired men, are reckoned at 10 per cent per annum. In order to keep up 70,000 effective men or thereabouts, we ought, therefore, to have sent out 3,500, but the number we actually did send was 2,800. I take the following statement from a paper sent home by Mr. Laing. On the 1st of September the effective force in India was 74,255; on the 1st of December, when all the recruits but 100 had arrived, it was 74,419; so that the sending out of 2,700 men added only about 200 to the strength of the army. Last autumn happened to be a very fatal time to the European army in India, owing to the prevalence of very severe cholera. I must beg hon. Members to bear in mind, that to hold India safely you must hold it with an adequate European force. An inadequate force is likely to lead to disorder and bloodshed. Therefore, to send out an inadequate number of recruits is not only the worst policy, but it

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  is also the worst economy. My hon. and gallant Friend behind me (Colonel Sykes) is constantly quoting the small expense of the army before the mutiny. In order to show how this was attained, I beg to refer him to a paragraph in one of the dispatches on the table, dated May 2, 1861—
  "The cost of the army is £11,500,000 a year in India, and in England £1,250,000; and this was below the proper cost, as it was only attained by allowing the 'effective' European force to remain dangerously below its established strength."
  I am not prepared to revert to so dangerous a course. I will now state the deficits (including expenditure on railways) of each year from 1856–7 to the present time. In 1856–7 the deficit was £474,000; in 1857–8 it was £8,390,000; in 1858–9 it was £14,187,000; in 1859–60 it was £10,769,000; in 1860–1 it was £4,021,000; in 1861–2, I estimate it at £595,000; and in 1862–3 at £284,000. These figures show that we are coming to a healthy state; and I hope and trust, that if the revenue thrives as it has done, we may at the end of the year be better off even than I now anticipate The system of open loan has been put an end to, and I trust we shall close that dangerous system of having only to put one's hand into the treasury for money without caring how it came there. I hope by a sound system of finance we shall soon have a permanent surplus, instead of a deficit year by year. With respect to a topic of the greatest possible importance—namely, the public works, and the prospect of the cotton cultivation in India—I stated very fully two or three weeks ago what has been done. I will now merely say the Madras and Sind lines of railroad are now open; the East Indian line will be open at the close of this year or the beginning of next year; and the Great Indian Peninsular, with its cotton branches and its very difficult works through the Ghauts, is making most satisfactory progress. The late Governor of Bombay, Sir George Clerk, who lately returned to England, gives the most promising account of the progress of the works. I mentioned before that the works on the Godavery were delayed principally in consequence of fever and the want of labor. Roads are being constructed for the purpose of bringing down cotton and acting as feeders to the railways, and they too have made satisfactory progress. I asked Sir George Clerk about the supply of cotton that was to be expected from India; and he says, so far as
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  Bombay is concerned the growth was considerably increased this year. The export from Bombay last year was about double that of the year before. Of course, whether the additional growth will make up for the exhaustion of the stocks on hand, which must have been the result of the large quantity which came last year, is what nobody can tell; but Sir George says he believes the price which is now paid will divert a large portion of the cotton from the native spinners to this country. And now a word as to Government interference After the fullest consideration, and taking the opinions of the most experienced and competent men, I have come to the conclusion that Government interference ought not to be given. I have always felt in the strongest way, and I do not, even in this case, see any reason for departing from that opinion, that in all matters of trade Government interference is pretty sure to be prejudicial. I believe in the present case what is wanted is the reasonable expectation on the part of the grower of a fair and permanent remuneration for his labor. That is the result of my inquiries, and I believe there is no difference in this respect between India and other parts of the world. That which takes place elsewhere, and in regard to other produce, will take place in India; in regard to cotton an adequate demand will produce an adequate supply. India produces a great number of other things—sugar, indigo, silk, jute; but an adequate inducement has been given to the ryots for producing them, and cotton also will be produced when a similar inducement is given. I saw the other day Mr. Saunders, who has been employed by Lord Canning to report on the growth of cotton in the North of India, and he said that the universal answer which he received to his inquiries was—"We require nothing from the Government; we only want buyers, and we will supply as much cotton as they require." I have been asked to send persons to obtain information as to the production of cotton. A commissioner was appointed in each Presidency for the purpose of obtaining the fullest possible information. The Cotton Supply Association sent their Secretary, Mr. Haywood, to India, who went into the western districts in company with a Government officer, in order that he might have every facility afforded to him. The Reports of the Commissioners are printed. Mr. Haywood is on his way home. I believe that as much information exists

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  on the subject as is needed, and what we want is not inquiry, but action. The mode of procuring cotton is well known. Transactions are carried on by means of advances made at Bombay, for instance, to agents in the country, and by them again to a series of native agents, each of whom makes a profit; but without some such system as this, I believe you could not reach the requisite number of ryots, who are only to be got at, not by the means of large capitalists, but by a great number of small dealers. Each ryot produces only a small quantity of cotton, If gentlemen in this country are desirous of sending agents to India for the purpose of getting into a more direct communication with the producers, that would be a legitimate mode of proceeding, and to any extent that the Government could fairly aid them in that purpose aid shall be afforded to them. I have been asked to send commissioners and interpreters with them, to facilitate communication with the ryots. My belief is that more can be done by the influence of the local officers, with whom the ryots are acquainted, than by sending persons round with the agents; but still the latter course shall be adopted, if desired. What I wish to be understood is, that the Government is not disposed to turn cotton merchant, but that any aid that can be reasonably given by the Government shall be readily given to those merchants or manufacturers who are disposed to put any agency of their own in motion for procuring a larger quantity or a better quality of cotton. There are other matters to which I now wish to refer. It is not in finance alone that great progress has been made in India. Great reforms and improvements in the administration of India have been made, and I believe that I am warranted in saying, that seldom, if ever, has so much been done in the same period in any country in the world. Last year an Act of Parliament was passed for the improvement of the administration of India. The whole Government of India was recast powers of legislation were restored to the presidencies of Madras and Bombay, which they have not exercised since 1833. A Council has been created in Bengal, to which also legislative powers have been given. All these Councils may deal with most matters within their respective jurisdictions, but there are certain more important questions which are reserved for the Council of the Governor General. To his Council as well as to
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  those in the different Presidencies, Europeans not in office, and native gentlemen, have been admitted. Three distinguished natives took their seats in the Governor General's Council. Five out of the six additional members at Bombay were natives. I am happy to say, that as far as we can judge of the experiment, it has succeeded. Natives of high rank, at much sacrifice to themselves, and casting away prejudices, have taken their place by the side of the Governor General in the Council; and having rended reports of their speeches, I must say that they take a statesmanlike, sensible view of the different questions brought under discussion. I was rather amused by the remark made with respect to them by an English member of Council, to the effect that "we must look after ourselves in order not to be surpassed by the natives." I have heard from an Englishman, than whom no one is better acquainted with India, that in Bengal it is impossible to describe the effect produced on the native mind by the presence in the Council there of three native gentlemen of rank. High Courts of Judicature have also been constituted in the three Presidencies, and I have not been able to place any native in these courts, only because no native is at present technically qualified for office in them; but I believe that natives will, when technically qualified, occupy places as satisfactorily in those courts as in the Councils. I will only shortly refer to the Civil Service, as I have already answered a question on this subject from the right hon. Gentleman opposite this evening. I do not anticipate that there will be room for the admission of any great number of persons in consequence of the recent Act; but the Lieutenant Governor of Bengal complains that, even with the extended field of selection, he cannot find fit persons enough for the administration of the provinces. I am sorry to say that the arrangements as regards the army are not yet completed; and I am aware of the not unnatural dissatisfaction which this circumstance has occasioned. The delay has been mainly occasioned by anxiety to give every consideration to the claims of officers in India. The old Indian regiments of artillery and engineers have already been gazetted as portions of the royal army. With respect to the regiments of infantry and cavalry which were to be formed as an addition to the Queen's army, the officers have not yet been posted. I cannot ac-

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  count for the delay; but we must wait until we receive from the Government and the Commander-in-Chief in India the list of officers selected. I hope, from what I hear, that the cause of delay has been removed, and that before long the additional regiments of the line will be gazetted. The native army has been considerably reduced. The reduction was necessary on political as well as financial considerations. A large native army is a source of danger, and I believe that a much smaller one will be equally effective. It is impossible, however, to deny that the reduction has involved some hardships on the officers and men. I can only say that the greatest consideration has been shown to them. The men have been discharged with gratuities or pensions according to their period of service. Additional retirements have been provided for the officers; many of them have joined the Staff Corps; and though we cannot at present say positively, I am inclined to believe that there are few, if any, for whom there is not present employment; and for all of them their full pay, and promotion to the higher ranks are continued as if their regiments were still in existence. I have been asked once or twice about the Indian navy, but I have not yet had an opportunity of consulting Sir George Clerk, who has recently returned to this country, on the subject. The Government are however, most anxious to consider fairly and liberally the claims of the officers of the navy, whatever may be ultimately decided on. So far as regards the changes which have been made from this country; but in matters more exclusively Indian the progress has been no less. With regard to the treatment of the native princes, a most important change has been made, for which Lord Canning deserves the highest praise. Formerly the native princes were subject to great anxiety, believing it to be the fixed intention of the British Government to get rid of them, and take possession of their territories. Considerable alarm was thereby caused among them; but Lord Canning reversed that policy, and avowed that it was not the intention of the Government to annex their territories. He consequently set the minds of the native princes at ease, and nothing can be more satisfactory than the result of that policy. I have the testimony of Sir George Clerk, than whom no one knows India better, to the effect that this policy of Lord Canning has been the source of the greatest strength
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  to us in India, and that we might now reckon on the support of ten or twelve in lieu of three or four chiefs who were with us before. The next change which Lord Canning introduced has reference to the creation of an intermediate class between the peasantry and the great chiefs. The general effect of our rule has been to destroy such a body of persons, and the peasantry has enjoyed the greatest advantages under our rule; if it were otherwise, they would have taken part against us. It is, however, quite clear, that whatever advantages we may have conferred on the peasantry, it was not a natural state of things that there should be no independent intermediate class connected with land. Lord Canning endeavored to provide a remedy for that state of things, and the experiment which he made in our new territory of Oude has, I am happy to say, so far been most satisfactory. There is a remark made by Lord Canning in connection with this subject which, perhaps, I may be allowed to quote. In addressing the talookdars of Oude, he said—
  "While you, who are now the independent magistracy of your province, have already become, although you are the newest of the Queen's subjects, the foremost of them in the practice of self-government, and in enforcing by your example and authority an intelligent reverence for law and order."
  It is, indeed, remarkable that the persons intrusted with so much power, have displayed not only great skill, but also the utmost impartiality. They, moreover, have shown their loyalty in various ways. They offered Lord Canning to put down the practice of infanticide; and feeling the great sorrow which oppressed their Sovereign and our own, they determined to forego all demonstrations of joy on one of their great festivals, which is usually celebrated with great rejoicing. Measures, with the objects that I have stated, were passed by Lord Canning. But there was another which he had not time to carry into operation, but about which he was equally anxious. He felt that it was most advisable to take some steps to benefit the general owners of land. Lord Stanley, some time ago, wrote a dispatch, calling the attention of the Indian Government to the sale of waste lands, and the redemption of land revenue. That subject Lord Canning proceeded to take into consideration, and certain Resolutions of the Government of India on these subjects have

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  been published. About the same time Lord Canning sent Colonel Baird Smith to the North Western Provinces, to make inquiries with respect to the best mode of preventing a recurrence of the famine which unfortunately prevailed in that quarter. Colonel Smith, in the performance of that duty, became very much struck with the improved condition of the people since the last famine, which was, in his opinion, to be attributed to the longer leases which had been granted, and the more provident habits which had been produced by the circumstance of a more permanent tenure of land being enjoyed by the occupiers. The consequence was a recommendation by him of a permanent settlement of the land. Lord Canning was much struck with the proposal, and sought for further information on the subject; but he had not time, I regret to say, to mature any measure dealing with it. In conjunction, however, with my Council, I have had it under consideration for some time, and Her Majesty's Government have determined to carry out a measure for the permanent settlement of the land revenue throughout India, as soon as the various districts are pronounced to be in a condition fit for it. Hon. Members must not, however, suppose that we propose, as was done by Lord Cornwallis in Bengal, to sacrifice, to a great extent, the rights of the actual owners of land. The settlements made throughout India for the purposes of the revenue, the holdings of the several occupiers being duly registered, will furnish us with the information necessary to enable us to avoid the evils of his proceeding. What we propose is, that a settlement should be made with each of the present occupiers, and that each should be secured in the possession of the land which he now holds, paying a fixed rent for it for ever. Great political advantage will, I think, be the result of the adoption of such a measure, inasmuch as it will tend to make the people of India attached to our rule, from which alone they can hope for the permanency of such an arrangement—and I need not point out the security afforded by permanent tenure for improvement in the condition of the country, such, I hope, as we have not yet witnessed. I may, perhaps, be allowed, while dealing with this part of the subject, to quote part of a report from Mr. Paterson Saunders on the state of Oude, in which he gives the answer of a most intelligent native on that subject,
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  and the views which he expresses, and which completely corroborate those on which we propose to act—
  …. "Nearly six months have elapsed since the publication of his Excellency the Viceroy and Governor General in Council's Resolution, and to this date not a single landholder in Oude or the North West Provinces has applied for the redemption of the tax upon his land. What the native landholders do want is a fixity of the public demand, that when the settlements now being made are completed, they should be fixed in permanence. I will here give the evidence of a most intelligent native in Oude, and from the unanimity of evidence I have gathered, I select him as the representative of the whole.
  "What, then, do you think is the real want of the country?—A permanent settlement on the half asset principle, and no other tax upon land. If I got a permanent settlement of my Jaghire, I would retire from the service of the Government, after having served for twenty-six years, without pension, give up my 600 rupees a month, and go and improve my estate.'
  "The want, then, of the landholders is a permanent settlement; and on this subject I will not waste further argument, for even his Honour the Lieutenant Governor of the North West Provinces has surrendered the whole question, when, in the 23rd paragraph of his Minute, dated Camp, Ghatumpore, 27th January, 1862, on my first report, he says that his comments upon it are not made 'with any intention of disputing the expediency of converting the settlements of these Provinces (subject to certain conditions) into a permanent settlement—for it is to that issue that the extension from time to time of the period of settlement has been gradually advancing…
  … …"If the Supreme Government of India proclaims the principle of permanency of settlement, and directs that all districts where the areas of measurement have been completed, and they are considered to be in a fit state for such permanent settlement, be at once settled, it may well be left to Governors of Provinces and Chief Commissioners to exempt such districts as are manifestly unprepared for such settlement."
  These last words express most correctly the order we have given. Of course, our plan will come gradually into operation, which will, I think, be all the better, as various modes of improving our proceeding may be developed in the progress of the measures which may be adopted in subsequent settlements. By these measures, for the benefit of the princes, the chiefs, and the people of India, I sincerely trust that we shall have done much to deserve and ensure their attachment to our rule. We have learnt a stern lesson from the recent mutiny in India. It will be necessary to keep up there a considerable military force; but our greatest strength will, I believe, lie in the attachment of the Indian people. I believe, in the words which Lord Canning addressed some time ago to the talookdars of Oude,

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  that, "in spite of bygone animosities, and of the broadest differences of race, religion, and social usages, a generous and trustful rule is the surest way to make a loyal and dutiful people." I cannot conclude, having mentioned the name of Lord Canning, without giving expression to the feeling which we all entertain of deep regret at the loss which the country has sustained in the death of that distinguished statesman. Never was a man more severely tried. He had every prospect of a peaceful rule when he went to India. The outbreak of the mutiny rudely dispelled his pleasant anticipations; but, through the severest storm which India has ever encountered, he with a calm and firm hand held the helm. He was not induced to take any rash step by fear or alarm; but, at the same time, he omitted nothing that was necessary for the maintenance of our power. All his actions were tempered with mercy, and he succeeded in suppressing the rebellion and in acquiring the affections of the people. Nor, when that success was achieved, was his policy less worthy of applause. He brought the finances of India into their present state by reductions carried out with a firm and unsparing hand. He conciliated the affections of all the princes, chiefs, and great landowners in India. His name has been a tower of strength, and his policy will be a tower of strength, continued, as I have no doubt it will be, by the noble Lord who has succeeded him, supported by the Government at home. One of the most remarkable events which have recently taken place in India was an address presented to Lord Canning not long ago by the inhabitants of Benares. Everybody knows that Benares is one of the most bigoted cities in India. Never since the days of Warren Hastings have the inhabitants of Benares approached a Governor General, Lord Canning passed through Benares shortly before he left India, and the inhabitants presented to him an address in which they expressed their estimation of the course he had pursued during the mutiny. It was the best testimony which he could have received of the success of his measures. The inhabitants of Benares said to him—
  "Your Excellency remembered in the time of victory and in the plenitude of restored power, that you were the representative of a Christian Government, and extended a merciful and unhoped-for clemency to those who might have looked-for extermination, while, at the same time, you fully vindicated the majesty of outraged law
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  and upheld the honour and dignity of the Government confided to your care."
  A more honourable testimony, or one more clearly expressed, could not have been given to his merits, and it was offered by a society as little likely to regard favourably a Christian rule as any to be found within the borders of our Indian empire. A difference of opinion may exist as to some of the measures which have been adopted in India, but it has been a source of the greatest satisfaction to me that every one of them, when mentioned in this House, has met with general approbation. We certainly have not been idle. The government of the country, the course of law the civil and military services have all been placed on a satisfactory footing, while the condition of the princes, the chiefs, the great landowners, and the peasantry of India has been improved. We know by past experience that danger may lurk beneath the most tranquil appearances; but a new era seems to have dawned upon India, and an amount of improvement is going on of which there has been no example in former times. It is our duty to guard against the recurrence of danger; but, as far as we can see at present, no such danger is apparent, and we have every reason to believe as well as hope that peace will be preserved, and that under the blessing of Divine Providence the connection between this country and India will be strengthened, and that the improvement of India will not only tend to the increased happiness of her people, but will be a source of wealth and benefit to the people of these Island.
  The right hon. Baronet concluded by moving the following Resolutions:—

  1. That the total net Revenues of the Territories and Departments under the immediate control of the Government of India for the year ended the 30th day of April 1861 amounted to £3,758,421 sterling, and the Charges thereof, for the same period, other than Military Charges, amounted to £3,412,724 sterling.

  2. That the total net Revenues of the Bengal Presidency for the year ended the 30th day of April 1861 amounted to £12,009,752 sterling, and the Charges thereof, for the same period, other than Military Charges, amounted to £2,441,829 sterling.

  3. That the total net Revenues of the North Western Provinces for the year ended the 30th day of April 1861 amounted to £5,056,801 sterling, and the Charges thereof, for the same period, other than Military Charges, amounted to £2,540,310 sterling.

  4. That the total net Revenues for the Punjaub for the year ended the 30th day of April 1861 amounted to £2,943,385 sterling, and the Charges

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  thereof, for the same period, other than Military Charges, amounted to £1,330,682 sterling.

  5. That the net Revenues of the Territories and Departments under the immediate control of the Government of India, of the Bengal Presidency, of the North Western Provinces, and of the Punjaub together, for the year ended the 30th day of April 1861, amounted to £23,768,359 sterling, and the Charges thereupon, including the Military Charges, amounted to £18,427,377 sterling, leaving a surplus available for the general Charges of India of £5,340,982 sterling.

  6. That the total net Revenues of the Madras Presidency (Fort St. George) for the year ended the 30th day of April 1861 amounted to £5,271,915 sterling, and the net Charges thereof, for the same period, amounted to £5,685,818 sterling, showing an excess of Charges over Revenue in the above Presidency of £413,903 sterling.

  7. That the total net Revenues of the Bombay Presidency for the year ended the 30th day of April 1861 amounted to £6,435,411 sterling, and the net Charges thereof, for the same period, amounted to £5,635,391 sterling, leaving a surplus available in the above Presidency for the general Charges of India of £800,020 sterling.

  8. That the total net Revenues of the several Presidencies for the year ended the 30th day of April 1861 amounted to £35,475,685 sterling, and the Charges thereof amounted to £29,748,586 sterling, leaving a surplus Revenue of £5,727,099 sterling.

  9. That the interest on the Registered Debt of India paid in the year ended the 30th day of April 1861 amounted to £3,232,104 sterling, and the Charges defrayed in England on account of the Indian Territory, in the same period, including guaranteed interest on the capital of Railway and other Companies, after deducting net traffic receipts of Railways amounted to £6,516,380 sterling, leaving a deficiency of Indian Income for the year ended as aforesaid to defray the above Interest and Charges of £4,021,385 sterling.

  MR. HENRY SEYMOURsaid, he cordially concurred in the eulogium which the right hon. Baronet had passed upon the late Earl Canning. He could not avoid remarking upon the singular and melancholy duty which appeared to fall upon this country, that we should yearly mourn the loss of some great statesman and benefactor of India. Mr. Wilson had died before the benefit of his valuable services had been felt. Mr. Ritchie had died—now Earl Canning was dead; and Mr. Laing had been compelled to return from India by an attack of illness which had nearly proved fatal, and from which he was still suffering. Fortunately he still survived; and, whatever might have been his shortcomings, there remained enough of good done by him during his short residence in India to entitle him to the gratitude of his country. Seven years age the finances of India were stated by Lord Dalhousie to be in a deplorable condition, and he asked that a financier acquainted with the system of
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  keeping the public accounts in India should be sent out. He was told in reply that there were plenty of able financiers and accountants in India, and it was five years before a gentleman well versed in the subject was sent. This was very unfortunate, for the consequence was that the delay had produced great confusion, and had delayed all attempts at improvement. Mr. Wilson had fallen a victim to his exertions, but before he died he laid the foundation of all the improvements which had since been made. At last this department was getting into something like order, although it was far from being complete. The first fault found with Mr. Laing by the right hon. Gentleman had regard to deficits being added instead of subtracted in the year 1861; but it should be remembered that Mr. Laing only arrived in India on the 1st of January of that year; and considering the amount of business he had to transact, some excuse ought to be made for him in having committed that mistake, which led to no result, one error having balanced another. Both Mr. Laing and Mr. Wilson joined in the opinion that there should not be so many estimates. They had an anticipation estimate, a sketch estimate, and a regular estimate; then they came to the accounts of the year, and when they discussed them they were fifteen months behind. There should be only one estimate and one statement of accounts. With reference to the loss by the exchange, the Government of India had sent a memorandum by Mr. Laing in December last. The right hon. Gentleman answered it on the 15th of February; but although he went into all the other items in that memorandum, he never alluded to the loss by exchange; it was not, therefore, unnatural that Mr. Laing should suppose that the right hon. Gentleman was satisfied with the explanation that had been offered. This was not a matter between the right hon. Gentleman and Mr. Laing, but between the right hon. Gentleman and the whole Government of India; who were all of the same opinion with Mr. Laing. Mr. Laing was not, then, open to any severe animadversion with respect to this point either in 1861–2 or in 1862–3, for he had not received any remonstrance on the subject till his financial statement was made in June last. Whether the China advances were right or wrong, he thought the answer of the Indian Government on that head perfectly satisfactory. With respect to the cash balances, he admitted to the right

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  hon. Gentleman that they were not all profit; but when the Indian Government stated that cash balances to the amount of £8,000,000 were sufficient to carry on the Indian Government, and they had cash balances to the amount of £18,000,000, surely the additional £10,000,000 might be considered as available surplus. When Lord Dalhousie had a balance of only £14,000,000, he was authorized by the India Board to apply a certain portion of it to public works in India. Then, how had the Indian Government dealt with the surplus they calculated they possessed? The protective duties had been taken off. The removal of the 5 per cent from piece goods was a very judicious measure; and it was better to trust to the £500,000 being met from the surplus of the cash balances rather than to raise that sum by obnoxious taxes. The remission of £250,000 of the income tax had entirely relieved two-thirds of the persons who were liable to this odious impost. That was a most salutary change. He was gratified to hear the right hon. Gentleman's opinion about the income tax. Almost the first words which the late lamented Lord Canning spoke to Mr. Laing on his arrival was, that he would rather govern India with 40,000 British troops without an income tax than govern it with 100,000 British troops with such a tax. It was therefore satisfactory to find that the right hon. Gentleman had reduced that obnoxious impost. He regretted that the Home Government should have placed the restriction they had done on the expenditure upon education, and also upon roads in India. The chief Superintendent of Works in India had forcibly pointed out the disadvantages of voting mere driblets for the roads. It was almost incredible, after all the experience of the mutiny, that the roads between Calcutta and the North West Provinces should be still so much neglected. Even within a few miles of Calcutta there was a want of bridges and the most ordinary accommodation for traffic. Considering the wonderful fertility of the Delta of Bengal and its enormous population, there was no wonder that the Chief Superintendent of Works should have urged the Government to make a much larger expenditure upon improved means of communication than the niggardly sum which the home Government sanctioned. He hoped the Secretary of State would reconsider the prohibition he had placed upon the Government of India, and allow
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  them to carry out their budget. If ever there was a Government which deserved to have large latitude in this respect, it was the present Government of India, which had reduced the annual expenditure by many millions. Some effort ought to be made to diminish the Indian home expenditure. The manner in which large sums were laid out in building palaces—for such they were—for the Indian Department in England created a feeling of jealousy in India, where severe retrenchment was insisted upon even in regard to the most urgent public works. While the Indian Council at home was but an experiment, they ought not to spend £100,000 or £200,000 in providing a new palace for it, where everybody would be made so exceedingly comfortable, that when once they had got into it, they would not at all like to be turned out again. There were very great complaints as to the mode in which business was transacted in the new India Office—more, indeed, than under the old Court of Directors, and it was not yet certain that the Department would be permanent. He could not see why the India Board should cost the vast sum that was set down for it in the Estimates. He trusted the right hon. Gentleman would turn his attention to the subject before next Session. With respect to Mr. Laing and the Indian Government, they had not had a proper opportunity of seeing the receipt side of Indian home account. Information as to the home charges had been furnished to them, but not as to the home receipts. He did not think it was quite fair for the home Government to withhold all statements of the home expenditure, and therefore there was some palliation for the conduct of the Indian Governments He was glad to find that the statement of that evening was more satisfactory than former statements had been, and that there was no mention of a loan, as was the case last year. The only matter to interfere with complete satisfaction was the little difference that had arisen between the Secretary of State and the Government of India, which had been occasioned by the anxiety of the Indian Government, which was responsible for the well-being of that country, to reduce the expenditure to the lowest point. The new Governor General had agreed with his predecessor upon that point, and there was every ground to hope that next year there would be a sufficient surplus to enable the right hon. Gentleman to sanction a greater expenditure. At

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  present, besides the cash balances, there was a reserve of £5,000,000 expended in the year on public works, only £500,000 of which was military expenditure, and the remainder was reproductive expenditure. He had no doubt that those public works would be eventually profitable, and even now they had benefited the community of India, and had increased the revenue of India by the money which they had caused to be circulated among the population. The only point upon which he differed from the right hon. Gentleman was that he appeared to be rather too diffident in encouraging the investment of British capital in India. There were few parts of the world where railways had been carried out without the assistance of the State, and he should be glad to see the right hon. Gentleman the Secretary of State for India give greater encouragement than he had hitherto done to British enterprise in India in connection with Government aid. For example, he thought that irrigation companies should have received greater encouragement, as no works were more likely to produce permanent benefit in India than works of irrigation. He was also of opinion that greater encouragement should be given to the sale of waste land in India. He trusted the right hon. Gentleman would reconsider his determination upon these matters.
  MR. SMOLLETTsaid, that he agreed in many things that had been said by the right hon. Gentleman the Secretary for India; but having been many years in that country, he was desirous of offering a few remarks upon the management of the finances of India in this country. In the first place, he wished to make two admissions. He admitted that great progress had been made towards affecting an equilibrium between income and expenditure in India. The great reduction in the army, to which that state of things was mainly traceable, was due chiefly to the efforts of a Commission that had been appointed in India to carry out reductions. He also admitted that there had been a great advance in the material prosperity of India and its inhabitants, which had begun in 1850, and had continued until the present time. The price of cereals had more than doubled; and as India yielded a vast amount of raw produce, and as almost every class in the country were more or less dependent upon agriculture, the increase of prices had greatly increased the general prosperity. Hence the great ad-
  464
  vance in the revenue generally, and in the land revenue particularly, on which one half of the Indian revenue depended. But he must say he thought the management of Indian finance was most faulty, as was proved by the simple fact, that while many of the taxes were temporary, the expenditure for the present year was greater by £10,000,000 than it was five years ago. Indian finance ought to be and might be clear and intelligible, but it was never dealt with in that House in a manner calculated to make the subject popular. When Mr. Wilson went to Calcutta, the income was between £38,000,000 and £39,000,000, while the expenditure was £48,000,000, leaving a deficit of about £10,000,000. That deficit arose from the extravagant expenditure in the army, the Commissariat, the Staff Corps, and the civil servants in the Public Works Department. The Governor General ought to have put an end to that extravagance, and to have produced an equilibrium between expenditure and revenue; which might easily have been achieved without taxing the manufacturers of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and without even the aid of a "great arithmetician" from the Treasury Bench, like Mr. Laing, whose only qualification seemed to be that he knew nothing about Indian affairs. No part of the reductions recently made, he contended, belonged to Mr. Laing—they would all have been carried out if neither Mr. Wilson nor Mr. Laing had gone out to India at all. They had been made entirely in the expenses of the public departments, and nobody could make those reductions except the Governor General, aided by public servants of long Indian experience. Clear as Indian finance really was, every attempt was made to mystify it whenever the subject was discussed in that House. Last year a loan was announced for India, and the right hon. Gentleman, in answer to a question from the hon. Member for London which appeared to have been pre-arranged, made what was called a "prosperity speech," saying that the finances of India were quite buoyant, and that the money was only wanted for the railways. It turned out afterwards that the expenditure exceeded the income by about £4,000,000, which was made up by money wholly raised in this country—for not a shilling of it, he believed, was raised in India. This same system of mystification was followed in the months of July and August, when the right hon. Gentleman came forward to

  465
  ask to borrow £8,000,000, at the very time when Mr. Laing was telling the people of Calcutta that there would be a balance of from £200,000 to £300,000 surplus revenue. The loan was asked for on the ground that the railway companies in India wanted the money to carry on their works there. He did not believe that to be a true representation of the matter, and he must enter his protest strongly against the public money being mixed up with the money of private adventurers, and it was quite time that that system of juggling should be put an end to. There was no reason why the accounts of the railway companies should not be kept separate from the public accounts; and if in 1861 it was found that the railway companies were unable to carry out their arrangements, the fact ought to have been made known to the House, and the arrangements previously made with the companies should have been cancelled. But instead of taking such a course, the Secretary for India borrowed £4,000,000 for the railway companies in question, and never communicated to the House who the particular company was, the terms of their agreement, or what security they had given for those advances. He protested against the system of mixing up the private affairs of individuals with the money of the Government. That system had been carried on too long, and it was from these collusions and mystifications that all the difficulties had arisen with respect to Indian finance. The Government had been patronizing companies of every kind for India—flotilla companies, irrigation companies, navigation companies, many of which would never have been floated on the London Stock Exchange but for the mischievous system of guarantees. The hon. Gentleman then described the origin and progress of a company which he said was started in 1858, having emanated from the brain of Colonel Cotton; it had received encouragement from the noble Lord the Member for King's Lynn (Lord Stanley), had raised £50,000, in payments of £1 per share, and The Times newspaper showed that the shares upon the pound which had been paid were between £2 and £3 premium, all owing to the mischievous patronage of the India Office. The hon. Member also commented on the conduct of Sir Charles Trevelyan in 1859 in attempting to write up the Godavery navigation scheme. Such a system ought to be immediately discontinued. The House ought,
  466
  for the future, to exercise a proper control over Indian finance. There was scarcely any person in the House capable of properly dealing with the subject. One of the first things that ought to be done was to repeal that portion of the Act of Parliament which prevented the Members of the Indian Council from sitting in the House, so that these men might be able in future to bring their information to bear on Indian subjects. He would also suggest the propriety of passing a Resolution that hereafter no loans whatever should be raised for Indian purposes on the London Stock Exchange either directly or indirectly, through guaranteed companies. He also proposed, that considering we had taken Indian affairs out of the hands of the East India Company and transferred them to the management of a Secretary of State, instead of bringing forward a budget at a late period of the Session, a sketch should be given at the commencement of each Session stating the amount of the Estimates for the year, and that Votes should be taken on the principal items of expenditure. He could not see any reason why the number of European troops should not be voted in that manner. His next proposal was that a stop should be put to any further guarantees to private companies by the Secretary of State for India on his own authority. He made this proposal to save the virtue of Chancellors of the Exchequer from libertines from Manchester and the Stock Exchange. Next Session he should move that no further guarantee or extension of existing guarantees be made by the Secretary of State without a preliminary vote of the House, on the responsibility of the Secretary. Unless these amendments were introduced into the existing system, the sooner the annual farce of an Indian budget was put an end to the better, and the responsibility of governing India thrown on the Secretary of State.
  MR. GREGSONsaid, he did not agree with the hon. Member for Poole (Mr. H. Seymour) that the home expenditure of the Indian Government was exorbitant. As to the hon. Gentleman's charge, that a palace was being built for the India Office, he replied, that it was essential that ample accommodation should be afforded for all the officers of the Department. With regard to telegraphic communication with India, he believed that the sooner it was completed the better, and in respect to the absence of the Mem-

  467
  bers of the Indian Council from that House, he expressed his regret that that arrangement, against which he divided the House at the time, had been come to. He was of opinion that the Indian accounts should be brought down to a later period than April. The charge for exchange was a matter in dispute, but as it had been allowed on former occasions, he did not see why it should be excluded from the Estimates now. As to the repayments of advances, if the money originally formed part of the revenue account, the repayments should go back to revenue, and in like manner they should go back to the cash balances, if the advances were taken, as it appeared that they were, from them. He was gratified the income had so much increased, though the expenditure seemed to have increased in the same proportion. He was very glad that the system of open loans in India had been put an end to; and he trusted that the public works would continue to progress as satisfactorily as they were now stated to be progressing.
  MR. VANSITTARTsaid, it was unnecessary that he should say a single word in defence of the Financial Secretary of the Indian Government (Mr. Lushington) after the manner in which he had been exonerated from all blame by the Secretary for India. He should, therefore, pass at once to the points more immediately involved in the question under discussion. Without presuming to offer any opinion as to the necessity of the right hon. Baronet (Sir C. Wood) addressing Mr. Laing in the very extraordinary language contained in that painful correspondence embodied in a Return dated the 23rd of June last, or whether Mr. Laing was justified in retorting upon the right hon. Gentleman in an equally extraordinary tone, he would merely observe that there was no doubt Mr. Laing had experienced considerable difficulty in unravelling the tangled skein of Indian finance. Feeling this, and learning on his arrival in this country that the right hon. Baronet's despatch of the 9th of June, in which very serious charges were brought against him, had been made public, it could hardly form a matter of surprise that Mr. Laing penned the following rather warm rejoinder:—
  "When I look at the marvellous results of that last year, in which all the fruits of Lord Canning's policy seemed to blossom forth at once, I confess that a despatch which, before his remains are cold in the grave, holds him up to the public of England as a weak ruler, led by an ignorant or unscrupulous Chancellor of the Exchequer
  468
  into financial blunders which have created a deficit, takes me greatly by surprise."
  He must confess, however, that on reading Mr. Laing's financial statement, as reported in the Hurkaru newspaper by authority, he was not disposed to join in that enthusiastic chorus of applause with which it was received by the excited Indian press, nor to be deceived into the belief that he had succeeded in obtaining a bonâ fide surplus of £903,814, as stated by him in his speech of the 16th of April last, and which he had disposed of in such a hurried and summary manner. He was also surprised that Mr. Laing thought it necessary to make that statement before the expiration of the financial year; for it necessarily became a mere sketch estimate, made up of returns, &c., consisting of ten months of reality and two months of conjecture; and, strange to say, the mail which succeeded that which brought it home announced a failure in the opium trade, regarding which Mr. Laing admitted in his speech that unless China was able to spend £8,000,000 on Indian opium this year, the revenue must diminish. If, therefore, Mr. Laing had been less precipitate in making his financial statement, or had paid a little attention to the actual figures of the account giving the real expenditure, we should not probably have heard a single word about a surplus this year. The real fact was, Mr. Laing rushed out to Calcutta during the pleasant months of the year, and in his anxiety to return home, instead of waiting for the returns and disbursement from the different departments, was intent only upon making a prosperity speech, trusting to the Indian press to carry him safely through against any criticism which might be passed upon it by the Home Secretary and his Council, whose duty it was to revise it, and acquaint the public with the real state of the case. Assuming for the moment that Mr. Laing had a bonâ fide surplus of £903,814, he was at a loss to reconcile the manner in which he had disposed of it with the spirited reply he gave to a deputation from the Chamber of Commerce and the British Land Association a few months ago—namely—
  "He (Mr. Laing) thought the first duty of a Chancellor of the Exchequer was to resist the desire to gain popularity by remitting taxes unless he was assured of a solid surplus."
  In the face of this declaration he was surprised to find among the taxes he selected to remit stood the paper duty, which most

  469
  providentially was not of the same importance to the Indian revenue as it was to the English. He next flung away a large sum of money for the purposes of education, and partially reduced the income tax and the customs duties on manufactured goods. The consequence was, as was generally the case with all half-and-half measures, neither of these two latter interests were satisfied. This especially applied to the income tax; for although Mr. Laing had promised it should cease altogether in three years, yet the Indian community could not so easily forget that our present Chancellor of the Exchequer, during those seven long years he sat on the Opposition benches of that House, vehemently denounced the iniquity of this odious and oppressive war tax, and took his present Colleague, the right hon. Baronet the Member for Radnor (Sir George Lewis), sharply to task for not reducing it; whereas, the moment he had succeeded in displacing him, he not only forgot his promise and professions, but doubled and trebled it, though two millions a year fell in most opportunely at the time by the expiration of certain Long Annuities. Mr. Laing complained with justice of the heavy home charges, which amounted to no less than £9,000,000, or one-fourth of the whole Indian expenditure. He thought the cause might be partly traced to the extravagant manner in which the loans were raised after the mutiny, against which he had repeatedly protested. These loans, which had increased the Indian debt from £50,000,000 to £100,000,000, were offered to the public under an Act of Parliament below par, bearing interest at 5 per cent for ten years, payable at the Bank of England, without any provision having been made to pay them off at the expiration of the ten years, as was the practice with railway and other commercial companies. That being the case, there was no doubt that these loans had the advantage of the security of an Imperial guarantee, which made the arrangement not only needlessly extravagant, but very injurious to the interests of the British fundholder. From a Return dated the 14th of May last, from the India Office, he found that the interest of this stock had increased from £341,975 for 1860–1 to £671,890 for 1861–2. When we reflected upon the conciliatory measures which had been passed during the administration of the much-lamented Earl Can-
  470
  ning—namely, the restoration of the Oude talookdars, the recognition of the law of adoption, the redemption of the land tax, the sale of waste lands, the extension of the permanent settlement, and the total abolition of the licence and trade taxes—he must say he thought, if further taxation was necessary, that the time had arrived to call upon the opulent Mahagim, the Calcutta Baboo, and other money extortioners, into whose hands the landed property was so rapidly falling, to contribute something towards the public revenue, in order to be appropriated towards paying off the £50,000,000 of additional debt to which he had just referred. For his own part, he could think of no fairer tax than a succession duty, somewhat similar to what prevailed in England, and better known in India as "Nuzeranna." To this day no tax was more popular and resorted to by the native princes who are independent of our rule than this "Nuzeranna" or "Salamee," for they argued it did not hit them but posterity. By cheerfully submitting to the imposition of this tax, our "Upper Ten Thousand" in India would not only have a graceful opportunity afforded them of showing their sense of gratitude to the British Government for stepping forward so promptly at the most critical period of their country's history to restore order and peace, but of expressing their conviction that few Governments, even under far more favourable circumstances, had attempted so much for their good, and carried so many of their attempts to a successful and beneficial issue.
  MR. CRAWFORDsaid, that the charge of the hon. Member for Dumbartonshire (Mr. Smollett) against the Secretary of State for India that he had been juggling the House, was a mere ad captandum argument, quite unworthy of any answer. In reply to the charge that the Secretary for India had been spending the balances belonging to the Indian railway companies, he observed that so long as the greater portion of the money provided for the construction of railways in India proceeded from this country, so long would it be necessary to spend here a certain portion of the receipts. The railway companies were constituted on the basis of a guarantee from the Indian Government. Without such guarantee it would have been impossible to obtain money in this country for the construction of Indian railways. He was in a position to state that the hon. Gentleman's observations regarding the

  471
  Indian railways were entirely unfounded. None of the companies had failed in carrying out the arrangements which they had made with the Indian Government. Leaving that subject, he wished to say a few words on the loss by exchange. Some years ago, when the railway companies were first formed, the rate of exchange was fixed at 1s. 10 d. for the rupee. He objected to that at that time, because he did not think it was based upon a sound principle, and because he was apprehensive that it would lead to inconvenience About 98 per cent of the capital required for railways in India was raised in this country, but the expenditure here did not amount to one-half of the whole; the remainder had to be sent to India for disbursement in that country. For every 1s. 10 d., which the railway companies paid in to the credit of the Secretary of State at the Bank of England, the Government had to disburse one rupee in India. The amount that was annually disbursed in India by the railway companies might be taken as equivalent to £6,000,000, which, at the rate of 1s. 10 d. per rupee, was represented by 65,000,000 rupees. In the accounts at Calcutta, however, the payments were entered at the conventional rate of 2s. per rupee, the whole thus amounting to 60,000,000 rupees. He maintained, then, that the sum to be included in the budget should be 65,000,000, and not 60,000,000. The additional 5,000,000 rupees, representing the loss by exchange, should be debited as a sum to be received at some future time—a sort of deferred receipt. He agreed with the Secretary of State that in course of time the deficiency arising from the loss by exchange might be recovered. He had listened with great attention to the statement of his right hon. Friend, and he was bound to observe, that so far as he was able to pronounce an opinion on the facts stated, he did look on the account given of the affairs of India as satisfactory in the extreme. With regard to the question of cotton, he entirely concurred with his right hon. Friend that it would have been the greatest invasion of all the principles of sound political economy for the Government to have interfered and guaranteed a fixed price for cotton at the port of shipment. As a general rule, the people of India would be found the best agents for developing the resources of that country. Upon the whole, it was impossible for any one connected with the trade of India not to feel that the present extent
  472
  of that trade was but a drop in the ocean compared with what it would be when the railroads in India were completed. The increase in the cotton, coffee, and tea trade would astonish the world. There was only one further remark he had to make. He wished that justice had been done to the merits of two gentlemen to whom, he must say, we were particularly indebted in connection with the reductions in military expenditure—he meant Colonel Jamieson and Colonel Balfour. They had rendered most important services, and he thought they were entitled to public acknowledgment.
  MR. KINNAIRDsaid, he had listened with great interest to the statement of the right hon. Gentleman the Secretary for India, and, without entering into the controversy about Mr. Laing, he must say that the right hon. Gentleman had borne out the statement he had made, and had satisfactorily answered the questions which had been put into their hands that morning. He did not know that he should have risen but for the speech of the hon. Member for Dumbartonshire (Mr. Smollett). That hon. Gentleman had made an attack upon Sir Charles Trevelyan which was scarcely worthy of him. He had ridiculed the visit which Sir Charles had paid to the Godavery, and said that he had come out with one of his claptrap statements. That was not language to be held respecting a public servant who had performed such eminent services as Sir Charles Trevelyan had done. He had himself seen a letter from an eyewitness, dated March last, with respect to the works now going on upon the Godavery, so that he could give the hon. Gentleman some information on the point. The letter stated that the whole delta was watered, the people paying to Government two and a half rupees an acre for irrigation, and the water-tax alone yielding a revenue of from five to six lacs of rupees; that every Native seemed well to do, the villages appearing to be full of comfort; that in most of them a patch of ground was set apart for the growth of cotton, the people cultivating just enough for their own consumption. [A laugh.] An hon. Gentleman opposite seemed to be much amused. Perhaps he regarded the dearth of cotton in Lancashire as a fit subject for laughter, ["No."] The improvement of the Godavery, instead of being a work to be sneered at, would tend not only to the future benefit of

  473
  India, but of this country also, especially in regard to the supply of the raw material of our staple manufacture. He had listened with extreme regret to the attack that had been made upon the Madras Irrigation Company. The noble Lord the Member for King's Lynn (Lord Stanley) had minutely examined the project of that Company, and they were encouraged by his sanction to undertake these great works. He trusted that his right hon. Friend the Secretary of State would not be deterred by the observations of the hon. Member for Dumbartonshire from aiding the development of the resources of India, where necessary, by a Government guarantee, and that he would use his best endeavours to encourage British capital to flow into that country.
  COLONEL DICKSONsaid, he did not know whether the hon. Gentleman who had just down was a member of an irrigation company himself; but he must protest against being supposed to regard the cotton famine in Lancashire with levity because he had smiled at hearing that certain persons in India grew enough cotton for their own consumption. He must say that he thought the hon. Member for Dumbartonshire had not been treated fairly in that debate, his remarks having been greatly misinterpreted. A debt of gratitude was due to that hon. Gentleman, who, speaking from his own knowledge of the subject, had exposed a scheme for introudcing capital into India which could not prove remunerative.
  MR. BUXTONsaid, that this was not the first occasion on which the hon. Member for Dumbartonshire (Mr. Smollett) had gone out of his way to express his contempt for a man who was not there to defend himself, and whose administration, during the year and a half that he was at Madras, had been spoken of on all sides in terms of the warmest admiration. It had been universally allowed that Sir Charles Trevelyan—whatever mistakes he might have made in respect to the publication of a certain despatch—had done a marvellous amount of work for the benefit of India, and that his recall, whether necessary or not, had been a misfortune, not to himself alone, but to the Natives of that country. With regard to the loss by the exchanges, he regarded what had been so termed as an investment by the Government in railways. It ought to appear under the head of Public Works; for it represented, in fact, a portion of the pub-
  474
  lic works undertaken by the Government in India.
  COLONEL SYKESsaid, that the right hon. Gentleman the Secretary of State had found fault with the Governor General, with his Council, and with his Chancellor of the Exchequer; but at the same time had been obliged to admit that Lord Canning and his Council had—by their recent legislative measures giving permanency to rights to land, by the admission of the just claims of the native nobility and gentry, and by the modification of the income tax, consolidated for many years to come British influence in India. With respect to the two points especially in dispute, the loss by exchange and taking credit for monies forthcoming from China, he thought Mr. Laing's own published statements were the best argument in favour of his view. The hon. Member then read the passage. With regard to the loss by exchange it was, according to Mr. Laing, a mere question of account, and was a theoretical and not a practical loss. With regard to the advances made in China account, the Secretary of State stated that the advances were never charged in the accounts of India; but such a sum as £1,700,000 must have been taken into account, or the cash balances represented £1,700,000 more than their real amount, a blunder not likely to be made. Mr. Laing did not mean that the amount brought in this year in repayment from China was revenue, but miscellaneous receipts. But the whole question was a mere matter of account, and did not deserve the discussion it had undergone; and even if the Government had been wrong in anything, after Mr. Laing's acknowledged public services there might have been more forbearance. He wished to say one word as to increased taxation from the income tax in India. The people of that country looked with horror upon new taxes, and especially upon an income tax, which brought an inspector into their houses and among their women, and unnecessarily gave rise to hostile feelings against us. He could not see the necessity for the enormous European force now maintained in India, exceeding 74,000 men, nor for the distrust of Native troops, when he remembered that it was the loyalty and discipline of the Native armies of Bombay and Madras which mainly prevented our being driven to the coast. The neck of the rebellion was broken by 45,000 European troops in

  475
  1857, and Delhi was taken before any reinforcements had arrived from Europe; but now we had no enemy, nor the prospect of an enemy to contend with. Lord Canning had said that he would rather maintain India with 40,000 Europeans and no new taxes, than with new taxes and 100,000 Europeans. The maintenance of this large force in India prevented the repeal of the 5 per cent import duty and of the income tax. He agreed with the right hon. Gentleman the Secretary of State, that we must maintain our power by an adequate military force; but if we desired its permanency, it must be more through the good will of the people than by the aid of the bayonet; but he doubted whether that good will could be conciliated if we maintained an income tax. Moreover, the fathers and mothers of England, and England itself, had a right to complain of the unnecessary waste of the youthful blood and sinew of the country by exposure to the great mortality in India.
  MR. MARSHsaid, he thought the worst possible tax in India was a tax upon cotton goods, which made the consumer in that country pay not only the tax upon imported goods which the Government received, but also a corresponding increased price upon native manufactures, from which the Government derived no benefit. He suggested that a small tax should be raised on the gold and silver ornaments worn by the men in India, which would, in fact, amount to a sort of poll tax.
  MR. PULLERsaid, he could not but regret that a gentleman who had so highly distinguished himself in India as Mr. Laing should, on returning to this country in broken health, be met by a despatch like that of the Secretary of State; great allowance must be made for his feelings under such circumstances. But, at the same time, as the home Government had taken such a view of the Indian budget, it could not but insist upon its views if it desired to retain its authority over the Government of India. One point had been altogether lost sight of in the discussion, and that was that the Indian budget presented to the House was but a partial budget. It was merely an estimate of the revenue and expenditure out of that revenue. It did not in any way show the cash balances. In such a state of things it might naturally become a matter of doubt as to which account certain items could be carried to. It would be unjust to Mr. Laing to say that there had been anything
  476
  like deception on his part, for the Indian Government was perfectly aware of the difference between him and the Secretary of State; but having received such clear instructions from home, it was the duty of the Indian Government to have made their accounts in the way prescribed to them. The right hon. Gentleman had pointed out that the £500,000 of repayments for the China war and advances to the Imperial Government did not in any way belong to revenue, but he had omitted to say what he intended to do with it. He suggested it should be applied to the improvement of the local communications, in the same manner as the £380,000 of which the right hon. Gentleman had spoken had been devoted to the making of roads. Such an expenditure would not only be of permanent advantage to India, but would facilitate our obtaining those supplies of cotton which were so much needed by this country at the present time.
  SIR CHARLES WOODsaid, he must express his gratitude for the kind manner in which the Committee had received his statement, and the credit which they seemed disposed to give to the Government for the course which they had taken in endeavouring to improve the condition of India. With regard to the interest on the Indian railways, it was treated as extraordinary expenditure now; and if it ever was repaid, the receipts would be treated as extraordinary receipts. In the same way the loss of exchange was an annual charge; and when the receipts came in, it would be treated as a portion of the annual receipts. As to the charges for China, they appeared under the head of supplies to London. They were, in point of fact, sums disbursed by the Indian Treasury in Calcutta, which were paid to the Indian Treasury in London. It was just as if a million of money was sent from Calcutta to London. The Indian Government advanced it for the service of the Imperial Government in India, and the Imperial Government repaid it here. It was nothing but a transfer of a million from the Treasury at Calcutta to the Treasury in London. With regard to the cash balances, they might be high, but this circumstance did not prove the existence of a surplus of income over charge, as they might be swelled from other sources. He hoped that there might be a surplus; but that would not prove, more than the amount of the cash balances proved, that any item was pro-

  477
  perly inserted or omitted in the accounts. It would only prove that the estimates of income and expenditure formed in India were wrong. But he wanted to establish a system of accounts which would show what the income and expenditure were, and how the finances of India really stood. He had already explained the matter fully, and no one had contravened the position which be had laid down in his statement to the Committee. He had a most painful duty imposed upon him. He had no intention to say anything which could personally annoy Mr. Laing; but as one of the minutes he had mentioned in the correspondence was signed by Mr. Laing, he could not avoid referring to that gentleman's name. Mr. Laing had exerted himself in the service of this country and of India, and he was most ready to bear witness to the importance of those services. Upon a point of principle he was obliged to challenge a doctrine laid down by Mr. Laing, and he was very sorry if he had unintentionally said anything to give offence to him or his friends. With regard to the health of the troops, what he said was that at the time the recruits arrived in India last year there was an excessive mortality, owing to the prevalence of cholera at that period.
  Resolutions agreed to.
  House resumed.
  Resolutions to be reported To-morrow.

LUNACY (SCOTLAND) BILL— [BILL No. 205.]

  LORDS' AMENDMENTS.
  THE LORD ADVOCATE, in moving that the Lords' Amendments to this Bill be considered, said, the Bill had come down from the other House under circumstances such as he never remembered as having occurred before. The Bill had been thoroughly considered in the House of Commons in all its stages. It had been sent up to the other House in ample time, it had been discussed there in all its stages, and it was not until the last stage—the third reading—that any important Amendment had been proposed. It was on the third reading that a clause was introduced which had entirely changed the character of the Bill. The Bill as it left that House proposed to continue the Board of Commissioners for two years; but an alteration had been made in the clause, by which all the advantages of the legislation of 1857 were lost for the want of machinery to carry it out.
  478
  The Bill had come back in the midst of a fire of artillery from out of doors greater than he had ever recollected in regard to any Scotch measure; but he denied that any imputation rested upon him, or that he had been guilty of any breach of faith. He had not been guilty of any breach of arrangement in striking the 22nd clause out of the Bill. It was struck out after full discussion, and its omission certainly did not escape the attention of the great majority of the Scotch Members. There was no understanding that he should put in a clause repealing the provision of 1857, but quite the reverse. He felt that he had no other alternative than to move now that the Lords' Amendment on this subject should not be agreed to. The Amendment had been proposed at a time when it was generally supposed that the Bill would pass with but trifling Amendments; and under that impression many Scotch Members had left town. The Amendment made in the other House had been made without any notice, and the country had had no opportunity of considering it.
  Lords Amendments considered, and agreed to, as far as Clause A.
  Clause A, read 2°.
  Motion made, and Question proposed, "That this House doth disagree with the Lords in the said Amendment."
  MR. BLACKBURNsaid, that any one who was acquainted with the learned Lord Advocate must acquit him of any intention to mislead or deceive, or any breach of trust on any side. The effect of the Lords' Amendment was that the Board should continue in existence as long as the Act should continue. He therefore proposed, as a mode of settling this matter, an Amendment upon the Amendment of the Lords, to the effect that the Board should continue till Parliament should otherwise determine.
  THE LORD ADVOCATEsaid, he should willingly have accepted such an Amendment in Committee; but he had doubts about accepting it now that so many of the Scotch Members were away. What he objected to was that the Bill as it came from the Lords destroyed the machinery by which the Act could be worked.
  MR. CRAWFORD MR. CRAWFORD moved the adjournment of the debate.
  Question proposed, "That the Debate be now adjourned."
  SIR JAMES FERGUSSONhoped the

  479
  hon. Member for the Ayr Burghs would not press his Motion. The compromise proposed by the hon. Member for Stirlingshire was a very fair one, and would give general satisfaction in Scotland.
  Motion and Original Question, by leave, withdrawn.
  Amendment amended, and agreed to.
  Consequential Amendment made to the Bill.
  Notice taken, that 40 Members were not present: House counted; and 40 Members not being present,
  House adjourned at Two o'clock.

MINUTES.
PUBLIC BILLS.—1a Divorce Court Public Offices Extension.
2a Metropolis Local Management Acts Amendment; Council of Medical Education.
3a Sheep (Ireland); Mutual Surrender of Criminals (Denmark).
Royal Assent.—Artillery Ranges; Rifle Volunteer Grounds Act (1860) Amendment; Crown Private Estates; Education of Pauper Children; Sale of Spirits; Discharged Prisoners Aid; Red Sea and India Telegraph Company; Chancery Regulation; African Slave Trade Treaty; West India Incumbered Estates Acts Amendment; Chancery Regulation (Ireland).

NEWSPAPERS, &c. BILL— [BILL NO. 147.]

  SECOND READING.
  Order of the Day for the Second Reading read.
  LORD CAMPBELL* rose to move the second reading of a Bill which had come up from the other House of Parliament to repeal the Act of 1819, which for the first time required securities from publishers and printers. Last year the same Bill came up from the House of Commons with the same general concurrence, which this year it had engaged, but too late to be considered by their Lordships. It was not to be confounded with a Bill which had come up in 1860, and which the House declined to read a second time, since that Bill proposed extensively to alter an Act of 1799 relating to the press, with which the present Bill in no way interfered; confined as it was to two Acts of Parliament by one of which in 1819 securities had been imposed—by the other in 1830 they had been in some degree extended. The two Acts were 60 Geo. III., c. 9, and 1 Will., IV., c. 73. Of this latter Act the first clause was not to be repealed, because it took away penalties which it was not intended to revive at present. It would therefore be seen, that

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  as no Vote had been taken on the present Bill, their Lordships were at perfect liberty to decide upon its merits.
  But if the House of Lords was not in any way committed on it, so much could not he said of the noble and learned Lord over the way (Lord Chelmsford), who had given notice to oppose it. A very few words would show that he was thoroughly engaged to its support. The principle of the present Bill was to repeal the Acts of Parliament which required securities of publishers and printers, and to preserve the Acts of Parliament which insisted on the registration of newspapers at Somerset House. And this, as he would now explain, was the principle repeatedly advanced and formally assented to by the late Government, in which the noble and learned Lord held a most conspicuous office. It was important to consider with exactness the course which the late Government had taken on this subject. On the 17th February, 1859, leave was moved to bring in a Bill prepared by Mr. Ayrton, Mr. Milner Gibson, and Mr. Collins, which proposed to repeal almost the whole of eight statutes bearing upon newspapers and printers, including the Act of 1819 and the Act of 1830. The Solicitor General of the late Government (Sir Hugh Cairns) admitted that many of the statutes proposed to be repealed were obsolete; that what was not enforced ought not to remain upon the statute-book—discussed the Bill in terms of general encouragement, with reserve as to the extent to which it ought to go. On March the 2nd, the Attorney General of the late Government declared that he had no objection to the second reading of the Bill. On March the 21st, in Committee, the Solicitor General, in terms much more precise, consented to the repeal of the first three Acts enumerated, including the Act of 1819—which was the main topic of debate tonight—but desired to keep two others he alluded to, by which the registration of newspapers was enforced. On the 7th April, another Member of the late Government (Mr. Sotheron Estcourt), speaking in their name, advised Mr. Ayrton to withdraw his Bill in prospect of the general election, and himself undertook in the next Session to offer legislation in a spirit not different from his own. To give precision to a pledge, which, although liberal, was vague, the Solicitor General proceeded to remark that, in the opinion of all parties, statutes which re-
  406
  quired securities ought to be repealed (as the Bill now before the House proposes to repeal them), and that those which required the printer's name to be attached to what he prints should be retained. The point to be considered, the Solicitor General went on to say, was, whether the law which required newspapers to be registered should or should not be adhered to. The legal organ of the late Government had not made his mind up even to that degree of rigour, while he renounced securities, in the name not only of his friends and of himself, but of all parties. Since then, the House of Commons, instructed by the late Government—for such language was instruction—sanctioned Bills to abrogate securities and keep up registration. And these are the securities which the noble and learned Lord, who then held the Great Seal, would now resist the abrogation of. The noble and learned Lord is too great a constitutional authority to maintain that the Lord Chancellor is not responsible for the language of the Attorney and Solicitor General speaking as the legal organs of the Government, or that their words are not to be considered as his own. It would ill become his character for vigilance to avow that a subject, of which he is at present nervously alive to the importance, at that time escaped him altogether. And he is too high-minded to have knowingly remained a leading Member of the Government which resolved to get rid of securities, while he himself was bent upon retaining them. Unless his opinions had undergone a revolution since 1859, he is bound to support the Bill before your Lordships.
  But although the Members of the late Government, and more particularly the noble and learned Lord, are thus engaged to its support, the House itself is not compelled by their opinion, and I will therefore briefly go into the merits of the question. The Act of 1819, which the House of Commons asks us to repeal, was among the celebrated Six Acts which in that year justly or unjustly brought odium on the Government of Lord Liverpool and of Lord Castlereagh. Most of them have expired, and only one or two remain on the statute-book. Their avowed object was, by extraordinary restraints, to meet extraordinary dangers. They were carried in November and December, 1819, and arose out of an unhappy conflict in the preceding August between the Yeomanry and a large crowd at Manchester, assembled

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  to petition for reform. In Parliament, the Opposition of that time, including Sir James Mackintosh, Mr. Brougham, Lord Erskine, and other distinguished men, appeared to waste their powers in resisting and denouncing them. By these authorities, the whole system comprised in the Six Acts was viewed as a tyrannical encroachment on the established freedom of the country, while the part we have before us, and which imposed securities on printers, was marked for separate attack and for particular and pointed reprobation. It was argued to be wholly new for a class who satisfied a public want to be called upon to give securities by others and themselves against some possible offence which had not yet arisen. It was urged, that printers ought not to be exposed to disadvantages by which no other class of tradesmen were affected. The Bill created also, as they reasoned, an invidious distinction between wealth and poverty. No man who had not ample means and opulent connections would now be able freely to deliver his opinions to the country. By these considerations the Bill was strongly reprimanded. At the same time, the Government who urged it were not without an answer. The time was fraught with agitation and uneasiness. It was deemed necessary, without any purpose of foreign policy or national defence, to increase the standing army by 10,000 men. Lord Castlereagh, the leader of the House of Commons, dwelling on the moment, likened it to that of 1745, when armies were supposed to be advancing upon London. In point of fact, at that time, neither the Crown, the Government, nor Parliament stood well in popular opinion. Sedition undoubtedly prevailed; discontent was its origin; the press was its exponent; and the Act of 1819 was therefore calculated, if not to check its source, to impose a limit on its utterance. The pleas which were opened to the Government of that day are now notoriously wanting. The preamble of the Act has long outlived the facts which it refers to as occasioning it. Even the severe distress which now prevails among the operatives has led to no political excitement, or disturbance, or complaint. Seditious publications are unknown, or scarcely ever heard of. The picture of society is as remote as possible from that which forced itself on the alarmed and unpopular Executive of 1819. Whatever case Lord Liverpool and Lord
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  Castlereagh were able to adduce for the Six Acts, taken as a whole, and this one in particular, is buried in their graves, and has not descended to their successors.
  But even admitting that exactly the same arguments and exactly the same facts which bore on 1819 were now available, a new consideration opens. If the law can be defended, it can not be enforced. In 1855 a Bill was carried to repeal all stamp duties on newspapers. In this way a great part of the Act of 1819 relative to stamps vanished altogether. So long as the stamps remained, a Board was ready to watch newspapers, to protect the revenue, and to see that the securities required by law were given. Stamps having passed away, there is no department of the State whose business it is, or to whom it naturally falls, to ascertain whether the recognizances have been entered into. The upshot is that the law can only be occasionally acted on. And this is its injustice. A publisher has not sufficient motive to observe, and yet encounters risk by disregarding it. The editor of an Irish Journal, the Dundalk Express, recently addressed me in a letter to explain that he had started a small paper about three year ago; that he was prosecuted by the Crown for not having entered into the Libel Bond; that to save himself from imprisonment he was forced to stop his publication, and to reduce his family to want; that after some time he re-established it, but at the cost of paying twenty per cent for the money he required, and giving one-fifth of the profits to the person who became his surety. In his own judgment he was ruined by being called on to provide against an offence for which, if it did arise, the law could put him into prison. Such cases would not occur if the Act of 1819 was enforced upon the one hand, or repealed upon the other. Publishers would make a point of finding the securities, or would not incur sudden and unexpected blows by venturing without them. At this moment there exists in London a weekly journal called The Index, of which the object is to vindicate the Southern cause during the war which rages on the other side of the Atlantic. Its pages have been thought to give a more lively and dramatic view of that extraordinary contest than any other source of printed information. It has evidently been set up by Southern gentlemen without a view to profit. Considering how seldom the Act of 1819 is enforced, they

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  might well have omitted to enter into the recognizances. In such a case, a Government who wished to act a servile part towards the Minister from Washington, might bring the terrors of the law upon them. I have thus brought before your Lordships the class of hardships which the Act of 1819 may from time to time inflict, and the class of journals against which it may be mischievously pointed.
  But even if proprietors and publishers were very seldom injured by it, the State would still be a loser by its action. Registration of newspapers, which the late Government were bent upon preserving, and which the House of Commons has preserved, becomes defeated by securities. The proprietors avoid the registration, because, unless they did, they would be compelled to find the sureties. There are hundreds of journals unregistered at present, all of which might register if securities were abrogated. To comply with the law upon securities, about eighteen persons have to take part in the transaction. No wonder, therefore, that the publishers avoid it when there is little hazard of detection. But in avoiding it, they must avoid the registration also. By keeping both weapons on the statute-book both of them are neutralized.
  It ought to be remembered, that when, in 1799, Mr. Pitt introduced a measure to restrain the press in a period of revolutionary ferment, he never ventured to exact securities from printers. In his speech of April the 19th in that year, he laid down with accuracy the restrictions which appeared to him to be desirable. The name of the printer was to be attached to publications. There was to be a register of printers and of presses kept by private persons; and last of all, a register of types and of persons to whom they were sold. Mr. Pitt at that time was unopposed, and could carry any measure which he offered. To exact securities of publishers had no place in his scheme. And yet so vulgar an expedient was hardly beyond the reach of his fertile and capacious mind when brought to bear on every detail of the subject. The more natural presumption is, that he considered and rejected it. Do our times demand restraints which Mr. Pitt in 1799 refused to fasten on his country?
  If, therefore, the noble and learned Lord persists in his intention, these are the positions which he is bound to overthrow: that the whole system of the Six Acts was
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  far from commanding public approbation at the time it was brought forward; that the Act by which securities were required from publishers and printers was most of all resented; that the circumstances which alone suggested or excused it have no place at present; that the abolition of the stamp duties takes away the means of enforcing the law with regularity; that registration, which the late Government alone desired to preserve, suffers from the attempt to go on with securities; and last of all, that by his Act of 1799 Mr. Pitt at once excluded and condemned them.
  It may, indeed, be true that by repealing the Act of 1819 we shall put an end to no extensive wrong, grant no considerable boon, and do little to be felt at all by the press or by the public. At the same time, to abrogate restrictions no longer called for can never be entirely unprofitable. It must tend to raise the character of Parliament. Since 1832 our policy has been to obliterate the traces of encroachment on settled rights, and to take away laws which were only passed because the country had not then the power to forbid them. To that policy we owe, at least in some degree, the remarkable tranquillity and matchless spirit of the people; and to that policy, by passing this Bill, your Lordships would make a safe, although, indeed, an unambitious contribution. The noble and learned Lord will find arrayed against him the authority not only of the celebrated man who opposed the Act of 1819 when it was started; not only of the House of Commons, which has twice unanimously voted its repeal; not only of Mr. Pitt, whose moderation has exposed it, but of his colleagues in the late Government who could only speak on such a point with his concurrence. But if he deems it right to be insensible to the engagements of the past, is it wise in him to overlook the voice and counsels of the future? In the ordinary course of things, those with whom he acts may by-and-by resume the offices they quitted. Does he imagine that a party which, not bound by previous declarations, transferred India from the Company to the Crown, proposed to take away the distinction of the town and county franchise, admitted the Jews to Parliament, will, when sitting upon this side of the House, venture to maintain the Act of 1819, after express and open pledges to abandon it? Should he not, therefore, pause before he allows those who feel interested in the

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  Bill before you to go away with this expression on their lips and this conclusion in their judgment—that a moderate and limited concession which they could not gain from the justice, from the self-control, from the recorded words and plighted faith of Opposition, they will by-and-by command from the embarrassments of power? My Lords, I move the second reading of the Bill.
  Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a.
  LORD CHELMSFORDthought their Lordships had some reason to complain of the manner in which they had been treated in regard to this and similar Bills. This measure—or a measnre very similar to this—had been sent up from the House of Commons every Session for three successive years. In the year 1860, at a very early period of the Session—namely, on the 7th February—a Bill to repeal the clauses of the Act of 1799 relating to printers, type founders, and the proprietors of printing presses, was brought up, and application was made to several noble Lords to take charge of it; but they all declined, and it lay on the table for five months utterly disregarded, waiting for some charitable hand to take it up. At length the noble Lord who had just spoken, pitying its destitute condition, consented to bring it before the House. He (Lord Chelmsford) proposed to the noble Lord to assent to the repeal of certain clauses which he believed were obsolete, and to retain those which he held to be still necessary; but the noble Lord would not agree to that arrangement; and the consequence was that he felt compelled to oppose the Bill, which was thrown out by thirty-six votes to ten. In the following year the Bill was brought up on the 30th of July, and the second reading fixed for the 2nd of August, though the Session terminated on the 6th of August. The noble Lord, however, on the advice of the noble Earl opposite (Earl Granville), withdrew the Bill for the Session; a noble Earl at that time said that the Bill was dead and gone. Gone it might be, but dead it was not, for here it was before them for the third time, and they must deal with it on its merits. His first objection was to the form of the Bill, which was of the most inconvenient description. It proposed in general terms to repeal the whole of two Acts of Parliament, with the exception of a single clause, without informing the House what those provisions were, and what would be the effect of re-
  412
  pealing them. Nothing could be more inconvenient than to draw up Bills in such a form. The noble Lord said that by the repeal of the stamp duty upon newspapers various clauses of the 60 Geo. III. had become inapplicable. That was no doubt correct; but there were other clauses which would require very careful consideration before their Lordships could give their assent to the repeal of them. Several, he thought, ought to be retained for the security of the public. One clause of that Act required that every printer of a newspaper, before he began to print it, should enter into a bond with two sureties, conditioning for the payment of any fine which might be imposed on the printer for any blasphemous or seditious libel which he might publish. There was also another clause, empowering any judge or justice of the peace before whom any such person charged with publishing a libel might be brought, to require him to enter recognizances. The 1 Will. IV. not only increased the penalty upon the bond, but also extended the conditions, and made the sureties liable to pay the damages which any person might recover for any libel which the printer might publish. Why were these securities which had been so carefully provided for the protection of the public to be withdrawn? The noble Lord had not advanced any argument why they should be abolished, nor was there any statement of the reasons in the preamble of the Bill. The noble Lord said that the newspaper stamp duty being repealed, great encouragement was given to the publication of cheap newspapers, and that persons of slender means would engage in this business if this Bill were passed. He should have thought that the conclusion of the noble Lord would have been the very reverse of that which he had drawn from the premises he laid down. It was well known that a few years ago newspapers of a low character were published for the purpose of extortion, by the publication of libels, and therefore he should have thought it necessary to continue those Acts which gave security to injure parties for obtaining satisfaction. Besides, these Acts operated as some security also for the good behaviour of the publishers, who were not likely to induce persons to become security for them unless they were known to be of respectable character. Believing that there was no protection for the public unless these securities were retained, he should move that

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  the Bill be read a second time that day three months.
  Amendment moved, to leave out "now" and insert "this day three months."
  EARL GRANVILLEsaid, he did not agree with the noble and learned Lord, and should be perfectly prepared to vote with his noble Friend on the ground taken by the Law Officers of the late Government—namely, that it was useless to maintain upon the statute book Acts which were practically obsolete, and which were never enforced. At the same time, the manner in which the Bill had been drawn was such that their Lordships were not likely to pass it in its present shape, and he would therefore suggest to his noble Friend that the Bill should be withdrawn, in order that it might be better adapted to effect the object which he had in view.
  LORD CAMPBELLentered into some reply to the observations of Lord Chelmsford, although he was content to rely on the shelter which the late Government had given to the principle of the Bill. As his noble Friend the President of the Council, although prepared to vote with him (Lord Campbell), would not be supported by all his Colleagues in the House, he should ask leave to withdraw the Motion for the second reading.
  LORD CHELMSFORDcould not agree to its withdrawal; the Bill must be negatived.
  On Question, That "now" stand part of the Motion? Resolved in the Negative; and Bill to be read 2a on this day three months.

METROPOLIS LOCAL MANAGEMENT ACTS AMENDMENT BILL.

  [BILL NO. 173.] SECOND READING.
  Order of the Day for the Second Reading read.
  LORD EBURYsaid, that the allegations contained in the Petitions which had been presented to their Lordships that evening had been largely entered into in the House of Commons. This was a Bill second in importance to none which had come up to their Lordships' House, inasmuch as it affected the personal comfort of every Member of the House. It was rather late in the Session to ask their Lordships to consent to an act of upwards of 100 clauses, but he hoped to be able to convince their Lordships of its necessity, and he trusted that they would con-
  414
  sent to proceed with it. The delay which had occurred was not due to any fault of the promoters, but to the severe ordeal which the Bill had gone through during the last three years in the House of Commons. Up to the year 1848 the Municipal Government of the City was in the hands of boards of sewers, to administer which there were upwards of 100 local Acts. In that year these boards of sewers were consolidated. It was then proposed to undertake a vast scheme of drainage, to raise large sums of money, and to enter into arrangements with the corporation of the City. Parliament accordingly not only established a new government for the metropolis, but they did away with nearly 200 other local Acts. This was effected by means of the Metropolis Local Management Act of 1855. Their next attempt was to apportion the debt for these works according to the benefits derived by the various districts. That attempt, however, only resulted in an immense amount of dissatisfaction, which had not yet subsided. It was not to be expected that an Act with powers so various should work satisfactorily without requiring amendment. In the year 1858 another Act was passed, by which authority was bestowed upon Government to give security for the loan of £3,000,000, for the main drainage scheme, which was to be levied by a rate for forty years upon the inhabitants of the metropolis alone. In this Act the principle was recognised of allowing rates to be levied all over the metropolis in the shape of official rates, and not according to the amount of local benefit conferred, which had previously been the system. In the course of this legislation some difficulty arose in reference to some debts due, which it had been in vain attempted to apportion according to the amount of local benefit derived from the money. In 1860, however, a Bill was introduced into the House of Commons to remedy this difficulty, and also some, other defects which existed; and the Bill having been referred to a Select Committee of five was passed by that House, and sent up to their Lordships. In 1861 a similar Bill passed the Commons, and early in the present Session the Bill now in question was introduced, and it had the same object as the two which had preceded it. The Bill had passed through the House of Commons with singular unanimity and without a single division. He assured their Lordships that there were provisions in it as to

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  borrowing money and as to other matters which it was most desirable to pass, and the postponing of which until another year would cause great inconvenience. He therefore trusted their Lordships would consent to the Motion for the second reading of the Bill.
  Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a.
  LORD RAVENSWORTHopposed the Bill, and recommended that it should be postponed until next Session. It contained very arbitrary and despotic powers of taxing property for the purposes of drainage, which their Lordships would do well to consider carefully before they sanctioned them. He moved that the Bill be read a second time that day three months.
  Amendment moved, to leave out "now," and insert "this day three months."
  LORD LLANOVERsaid, that experience had shown that the Act of 1855 required amendment, but there were many provisions in this Bill which he thought objectionable and improper. It would be quite impossible to deal with such a measure in a Committee of the Whole House, and he therefore hoped that his two noble Friends, who proposed and who opposed the Bill, would consent to refer it to a Select Committee.
  LORD EBURYshould have no objection to allow the Bill to go to a Select Committee.
  LORD RAVENSWORTHsaid, that upon that understanding he would withdraw his Amendment.
  Amendment (by leave of the House) withdrawn.
  Original Motion agreed to; and Bill read 2a accordingly, and referred to a Select Committee.
  And on the Monday next, Report from the Committee of Selection, That the following Lords be proposed to the House to form the Select Committee for the consideration of the said Bill; namely—

  The Marquess of BATH,

  The Lord RAVENSWORTH,

  The Lord EBURY,

  The LORD EGERTON (Chairman),

  The Lord LLANOVER.

  Agreed to; and the said Lords appointed accordingly.

POOR RELIEF (IRELAND) BILL.

  [BILL NO. 166.] COMMITTEE.
  House in Committee (according to Order).
  Clause 1 (For charging Expense of Relief).
  LORD LIFFORD LORD LIFFORD moved the omission of the word "immediately," in order that persons might not have any reason to induce the poorer classes to remove from their residences and thus become chargeable to another union.
  THE DUKE OF NEWCASTLEsaid, he should be willing to accede to the Amendment if the Irish Peers present desired it.
  Amendment agreed to; Clause as amended to stand part of the Bill.
  Clause 2 (Tenth Section of 10 Vict., c. 31, repealed).
  THE MARQUESS OF WESTMEATHsaid, no provision of the present Poor Law had been better considered than the Quarter-Acre Clause, and he saw no reason why it should be repealed.
  THE EARL OF CLANCARTYsaid, that the present law operated harshly in many cases, and he should therefore support the clause.
  THE EARL OF LEITRIMsaid, that the bringing forward this clause by the Government was a breach of faith; and if it was acceded to, extermination of the labouring classes would be common in Ireland, and it should be recollected that the population was already sufficiently reduced.
  THE EARL OF DESARTobjected to the repeal of the Quarter-Acre clause, and therefore thought that this clause should be struck out. There might be cases of hardship under the present law; but for the sake of the landlords, and considering that the holders of small quantities of land in Ireland were semi-farmers, semi-labourers, and semi-paupers, he trusted it would not be repealed.
  THE EARL OF ST. GERMANSsaid, that under the present law the wife and family of a man holding a quarter of an acre of land might be taken into a workhouse and receive relief, though the man himself could not receive relief.
  THE MARQUESS OF CLANRICARDEdissented from the noble Earl's view of the law. He wished to know who had petitioned in favour of a repeal of the law? There was not, in his opinion, any necessity for an alteration.
  THE DUKE OF NEWCASTLEsaid, the repeal of the Quarter-Acre Clause had been recommended by the Select Committee of the House of Commons, one of whom was the hon. Member for Galway (Mr. Gregory), who originally proposed it, and who

  417
  had recently stated in his place in the House of Commons that the clause was, from the altered state of the times in Ireland, not only unnecessary, but absolutely prejudicial to the labouring classes of Ireland.
  THE EARL OF DONOUGHMOREthought it would be beneficial if the Quarter-Acre Clause were repealed as regards in-door relief; but that this class of tenants should not be entitled to receive out-door relief. If the present clause were retained as it stood, the law was liable to be abused to the prejudice of the industrious ratepayers. He should therefore move that the clause be struck out.
  THE DUKE OF NEWCASTLEsaid, that he had no objection to the Amendment, which he considered would be a great improvement in the present law.
  THE EARL OF DERBYobserved that he was opposed to the extension of the system of out-door relief in Ireland. He would therefore support the Amendment; but if it were not adopted, he would vote in favour of the clause, which was based on the unanimous recommendation of the Select Committee of the House of Commons.
  Motion (by leave of the House) withdrawn.
  Clause agreed to.
  Clause 3 (Guardians may admit any poor Person requiring Medical or Surgical Aid in Hospital).
  THE EARL OF DONOUGHMORE THE EARL OF DONOUGHMORE moved that the clause be omitted. He contended, that if these union-hospitals were established, the result would be to destroy the system of county infirmaries, which worked extremely well. The county infirmaries were very popular, as was shown by the fact that in the four years from 1858 to 1861 the number of patients were 160,000, 184,000, 180,000, and 186,000; and they were also very useful for teaching young men the medical profession, a purpose for which it was not likely that the union-hospitals would be used. He did not deny that in some counties it was desirable to increase the number of hospitals, but surely this was no reason for destroying a system which worked well, in order to substitute one of which they knew nothing. He would mention another circumstance, and that was, that of late years there had been attempts to transfer charges from the county
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  rate to the poor rate; and the reason of this was that by arrangement in Ireland the tenants paid the whole of the county rate, whilst to the poor-rate the landlords contributed one-half.
  THE EARL OF LEITRIMurged, that the Bill should be withdrawn, as it settled nothing and unsettled everything.
  THE DUKE OF NEWCASTLEsaid, that the hospitals in Ireland were not sufficient to supply the wants of more than two-thirds of the population, while there was accommodation in the Irish workhouses for 92,000 more inmates than were received even in a time of distress; and the proposal was, to appropriate a portion of the surplus accommodation to hospital purposes. There was no intention to supersede the infirmaries, and all that could be said, was that rival institutions would be established. But with the reputation and favour which the infirmaries enjoyed there need be no fear of injuring them. In large counties the hospitals were useless to a large portion of the people in consequence of their great distance from the places where they resided, and this Bill would be a cheap and effectual mode of providing a remedy for that defect. He sincerely hoped that the Committee would agree to the clause.
  On Question, Whether the said Clause shall stand part of the Bill? their Lordships divided:—Contents 27; Not-Contents 29: Majority 2.

  CONTENTS.

  Newcastle, D.

  Dartrey, L. (L. Cremorne.)

  Somerset, D.

  De Tabley, L.

  Ailesbury, M.

  Foley, L. [Teller.]

  Granard, L. (E. Granard.)

  De Grey, E.

  Ducie, E.

  Harris, L.

  Granville, E.

  Mont Eagle, L. (M. Sligo.)

  Saint Germans, E.

  Ponsonby, L. (E. Bessborough.) [Teller.]

  Leinster, V. (D. Leinster.)

  Rivers, L.

  Torrington, V.

  Saye and Sele, L.

  Somerhill, L. (M. Clanricarde.)

  Worcester, Bp.

  Stanley of Alderley, L.

  Camoys, L.

  Sundridge, L. (D. Argyll.)

  Carew, L.

  NOT-CONTENTS.

  Westmeath, M.

  Clarina, L.

  Clements, L. (E. Leitrim.)

  Bandon, E.

  Cathcart, E.

  Clonbrock, L.

  Powis, E.

  Colchester, L.

  Romney, E.

  Congleton, L.

  Wicklow, E.

  Denman, L.

  Downes, L.

  Clancarty, V. (E. Clancarty.) [Teller.]

  Grantley, L.

  Grinstead, L. (E. Enniskillen.)

  De Vesci, V.

  Dungannon, V. [Teller.]

  Redesdale, L.

  Lifford, V.

  Silchester, L. (E. Longford.)

  Chichester, Bp.

  Tyrone, L. (M. Waterford.)

  Brodrick, L. (V. Midleton.)

  Worlingham, L. (E. Gosford.)

  Churston, L.

  Resolved in the Negative.
  Clauses 4 to 6 struck out.
  Clause 7 to 10 agreed to, with Amendments.
  Clause 11 (Religious Education of Children, the Religion of whose Parents is not known.)
  VISCOUNT DUNGANNONsaid, this was the most objectionable and absurd clause in the entire Bill. Under its provisions, a child found by a Quaker, a Jew, or an Anabaptist, was to be registered in the religion of the finder. He moved to omit from "Orphan" to the end of the clause.
  THE DUKE OF NEWCASTLEsaid, the existing law was a dead letter, and Law Officers of the Crown at different times had given conflicting opinions. Such perplexity had been felt with regard to this question that at last a Bill was brought in, directing the child to be registered in the religion of the majority of the guardians. It was easy to see into what strife Poor Law boards would be plunged by such a regulation. Another proposal was to decide the point by the religion of the majority of the inhabitants of the district; but there were districts in Ireland where the population was pretty evenly divided between Protestants, Presbyterians, and Roman Catholics. It was said that this question was a very important one and ought not to be left to chance; but, not to say it profanely, what was the religion of anybody but chance? The finder was the person in whose religion the child ought properly to be registered, because the child properly belonged to him, and no one except the parent had a right to take it out of his hands.
  THE EARL OF BANDONopposed the clause, and trusted their Lordships would not by, agreeing to it, sanction a breach of the law at present in force.
  THE EARL OF WICKLOWthought that in cases of the kind referred to the religion of the State should be the one in
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  which the children should be brought up; and if the noble Viscount would alter his Amendment, by simply moving the rejection of the last four lines of the clause, he would support him.
  VISCOUNT DUNGANNONhad not the slightest hesitation in accepting the suggestion of the noble Earl.
  THE EARL OF LEITRIMsuggested that if there was any difficulty about the enforcement of the existing law, the Poor Law Commissioners might send down a sealed order.
  On Question, Whether the words proposed to be left out shall stand Part of the Clause? their Lordships divided:—Contents 24; Non-Contents 26: Majority 2.
  Resolved in the Negative; Then the said clause, as amended, was agreed to.
  Remaining Clauses agreed to; Further Amendments made: Report thereof to be received To-morrow [Bill No. 197].
  House adjourned at a quarter before Eleven o'clock, till To-morrow, half-past Ten o'clock.